What is Data Visualization? Definition, Tools, & Examples

Key takeaways

• Data visualization is a powerful way for people, especially data professionals, to display data so that it can be interpreted easily.

• The goal is to tell a story with numbers and information by turning them into more visually digestible graphs and charts.

• Data visualization skills are integral to data science jobs but can also be valuable across industries like business and marketing.

Use the following article to learn more about data visualization, including benefits, examples, types, and tools. If you're ready to start sharpening your skills right away, consider earning the Microsoft Data Visualization Professional Certificate. In as little as four months, you could learn to build data models with DAX, apply statistical analyses, and prepare and transform data sets.

What is data visualization?

Data visualization is the process of making visuals like charts, maps, infographics, or graphs to organize data in a way that you can easily see and understand. These visualizations allow us to tell stories and easily understand any patterns, trends, or outliers in a data set.

Why is data visualization important?

Data visualization is an important tool to communicate complicated ideas and organize data in an engaging and easy-to-understand way. Data visualization also makes data accessible to the general public or specific audiences without technical knowledge. For example, a government health agency might provide a map of vaccinated regions. The purpose of data visualization is to help drive informed decision-making and to add colorful meaning to an otherwise bland database.

Types of data visualization

Visualizing data can be as simple as a bar graph or scatter plot but becomes powerful when analyzing, for example, the median age of the United States Congress vis-a-vis the median age of Americans. Common types of data visualizations are:

• Table: A table is data displayed in rows and columns, which can be easily created in a Word document or Excel spreadsheet.

• Chart or graph: Information is presented in tabular form with data displayed along an x and y axis, usually with bars, points, or lines, to represent data in comparison. An infographic is a special type of chart that combines visuals and words to illustrate the data.

• Gantt chart: A Gantt chart is a bar chart that portrays a timeline and tasks specifically used in project management.

• Pie chart: A pie chart divides data into percentages featured in “slices” of a pie, all adding up to 100 percent. 

• Geospatial visualization: Data is depicted in map form with shapes and colors that illustrate the relationship between specific locations, such as a choropleth or heat map.

• Dashboard: Data and visualizations are displayed, usually for business purposes, to help analysts understand and present data.

Data visualization examples

Data scientists and researchers have access to libraries using programming languages or tools such as Python or R, which they use to understand and identify patterns in data sets. Tools help these data professionals work more efficiently by coding research with colors, plots, lines, and shapes.

Business data visualization examples

Businesses collect a lot of data they have to manage and analyze to help inform data-driven decisions successfully. A few examples of the ways you might use data visualization in business include: 

• Inventory monitoring: You might use data visualization to manage your inventory and monitor the number of items in stock. Microsoft Visio created a program where you can look at a diagram of your storefront and see your inventory levels projected onto the items for sale. 

• Marketing: Tracking data such as web traffic and social media analytics can help marketers analyze how customers find their products and whether they are early adopters or more laggard buyers. Charts and graphs can synthesize data for marketers and stakeholders to better understand these trends. 

• Finance: Investors and advisors focused on buying and selling stocks, bonds, dividends, and other commodities will analyze the movement of prices over time to determine which are worth purchasing for short- or long-term periods. Line graphs help financial analysts visualize this data, toggling between months, years, and even decades.

• Customer support ticket management: You can use data visualization to organize information about customer support tickets, creating a dashboard that allows you to see the scope of your team's work and prioritize the most pressing issues. 

Health care data visualization examples

Data is vital to health care. Visualizations can help medical professionals and administrators manage their processes and improve patient outcomes through the insights that come from data. Explore a few examples of how you could use data visualization in health care: 

• Length of stay: A hospital or other organization could explore data related to the average length of stay of patients admitted to the hospital, organized to make it easier to spot patterns and trends. 

• Health policy: Policymakers can use choropleth maps, which are divided by geographical area (nations, states, continents) by colors. They can, for example, use these maps to demonstrate the mortality rates of cancer or ebola in different parts of the world. 

• Antibiotic resistance: Visualizations are also important to health care-related research. For instance, you might create one to view how different strains of bacteria have developed resistance to types of antibiotics over time as a bubble chart. 

• Patient dashboard: A patient portal or dashboard is a visualization that health care providers can use to share information about visits with their patients, including recent visits, diagnoses, and treatments. 

Data visualization and big data

Companies collect “big data” and synthesize it into information. Data visualization helps portray significant insights—like a heat map to illustrate regions where individuals search for mental health assistance. To synthesize all that data, visualization software can be used in conjunction with data collecting software.

Data visualization tools

You can find plenty of data visualization tools out there to suit your needs. Before committing to one, consider researching whether you need an open-source site or could simply create a graph using Excel or Google Charts. The following are common data visualization tools that could suit your needs. 

• Tableau: Tableau is a platform for data visualization that helps you understand, visualize, and act on your data. You can also use Tableau Public to create visualizations for free, linking directly to data in your Excel sheet or other formats.

• Excel and Google Sheets: You can use Excel or Google Sheets to create basic visualizations, including graphs and charts like pie charts, bar charts, line graphs, timelines, scatter plots, and more. 

• Microsoft Power BI: Microsoft Power BI is a platform for managing and analyzing business intelligence, including creating data visualizations. You can start with a free trial to get to know their features, which include connecting to and reporting on your data. 

Get started with a free tool

No matter the field, using visual representations to illustrate data can be immensely powerful. Tableau has a free public tool that anyone can use to create stunning visualizations for a school project, non-profit, or small business. 

Benefits of data visualization

Data visualization can be used in many contexts in nearly every field, like public policy, finance, marketing, retail, education, sports, history, and more. The benefits of data visualization include:

• Storytelling: People are drawn to colors and patterns in clothing, arts and culture, architecture, and more. Data is no different—colors and patterns allow us to visualize the story within the data.

• Accessibility: Information is shared in an accessible, easy-to-understand manner for a variety of audiences.

• Visualize relationships: It’s easier to spot the relationships and patterns within a data set when the information is presented in a graph or chart.

• Exploration: More accessible data means more opportunities to explore, collaborate, and inform actionable decisions.

Jobs that use data visualization

From marketing to data analytics, data visualization is a skill that can be beneficial to many industries. Building your skills in data visualization can help in the following jobs:

• Data visualization analyst: As a data visualization analyst (or specialist), you’d be responsible for creating and editing visual content such as maps, charts, and infographics from large data sets. 

• Data visualization engineer: Data visualization engineers and developers are experts in both maneuvering data with SQL, as well as assisting product teams in creating user-friendly dashboards that enable storytelling.

• Data analyst: A data analyst collects, cleans, and interprets data sets to answer questions or solve business problems.

Data is everywhere. In creative roles such as graphic designer, content strategist, or social media specialist, data visualization expertise can help you solve challenging problems. You could create dashboards to track analytics as an email marketer or make infographics as a communications designer.

Read more: 5 Data Visualization Jobs (+ Ways to Build Your Skills Now)

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