The power of Data Visualization: Why it's beneficial

Whether you are a college student, new to data analytics, an experienced data analyst, or engineer, you have heard or been told that telling stories with data is one of the most important aspects of data analytics. Being able to explain complex findings in the most succinct and visually appealing way is what data visualization is all about.

It's attractive and appealing to master skills such as Python, R and SQL due to their challenging yet rewarding nature, but many tend to forget about a skill as important as showcasing data findings via data visualization methods. Data Visualization is the succinct representation of data and information in the form of graphs, charts and tables to be understood and easily interpreted. It helps readers draw a quick conclusion in the simplest way e.g a mobile device company trying to understand which of their products has generated the lowest sales over the last 5 years in the Northeast region of the United States. It would be time-consuming to get this answer just by sifting through such large volume of data, so data visualization comes into play. With the increase in big data and more companies relying heavily on data to make key business decisions, it's important to be armed with the best data visualization tools and techniques to standout.

Two of the best data visualization tools currently are Microsoft PowerBI and Tableau.

Microsoft Power BI (an alternative to Microsoft Excel) is built specifically for data analytics and visualization. It has the power to accept data from many different sources, i.e Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, and transform it into various visuals. With Power BI, once the data is uploaded, a wide variety of visuals can be created using a combination of columns from the same table or different tables. To use different tables, there must exist a relationship between the tables in the form of a "primary data column"; a column in all tables with the exact data that can be used to linked each other. PowerBI allows you to create many charts and organize them into a creative dashboard that can be exported and shared. PowerBI has both a desktop app and online platform that reports can be published and shared.

Tableau, owned by Salesforce, it's one of the most powerful and popular visualization tools used in the Business Intelligence (BI) realm. One does not need any technical or coding skills to utilize this tool. Tableau has a powerful capability of extracting data from Microsoft Excel, pdfs, text documents and cloud databases. Tableau Desktop, the main interface, is similar to PowerBI Desktop and allows you to create charts, tables, graphs, data callouts and organize them to form a dashboard. Tableau can handle large amounts of data, hence why it's used by many organizations.

One of the main highlights of these tools is the ability to share the dashboard and report with other individuals within the same organization. However, individual users not belonging to an organization might not be able to share links to their dashboard without having the premium version of these tools.

Nonetheless, data visualization and the ability to tell a story with data is becoming increasingly relevant and needed, since more companies have become reliant on data to understand factors such as their operations, customers and competitors.