It’s Oh So Punny Post Title Day.
None the less, Stephen has started a series of posts under the title of ‘The Graph Hall of Shame’

You can e-mail your personal gems for nomination to sfew-at-perceptualedge-dot-com

If Stephen picks one of your submissions, we get the added bonus of he and other visualization aficianados commenting on all the issues and maybe even suggesting a tip or three to resolve those problems.

Data tables often get a bad rap in the data visualization world. I think this is because your default table whether in Excel or some other tool is amazingly boring and can do a great job of turning off the brain of you report users. However, it’s important to note that even the gurus like Edward Tufte and Stephen Few find visualization solutions with tables. Here’s a perfect example, illustrated in Perceptual Edge’s (Stephen Few) Gallery.

In it, Mr. Few takes a poorly designed polar plot and organizes the data succinctly into a table that would allow the end user to quickly and easily make the appropriate comparison.

Here are a few of the reasons I think people think tables don’t work or tables fail:

1. Reliance on the default appearance from the application
2. They’re not ‘cool’, ’sexy’, ’slick’, or like charts, graphs, and maps are
3. Table junk - just like chart junk, but in a table and in either venue the junk can ruin it
4. Overuse of either horizontal gridlines, vertical gridlines or both
5. Tables have two masters: visualization (design) rules and text (reading) rules because they are text-heavy users will, in part, have an expectation of reading like they would read a book, article, paper, etc

I happen to use tables all the time in my work so here are some of my tips for designing tables in Excel

• Don’t rely on the default gridlines. Once you have your data organized in the table, go to Tools > Options > View and take the check mark of ‘gridlines’
• Always have column headers and row headers (i.e. describe what the metric is labelled correctly, typically in the column header although your mileage may very, and what is being measured is in the row header)
• DO NOT justify the text. If the text is all justified, this diffuses the focus and makes it difficult for users to pay attention - align left, center or right as appropriate. In other words, ragged-edge text is easier to read
• Clearly seperate row and column headers from the data - this can be done using borders, cell color or both - but be careful about it, less is more
• Use borders sparingly, especially horizontal borders. Anything that over-enforces the regularness of the table should be avoided - most users only need a hint of structure in order for them to internalize it, this is the same rule we apply in chart design when removing or de-emphazing axis gridlines
• Use an appropriate sized font - probably 10pt or higher, but it depends
• Whatever you do, make sure that the focus is on the data, if users are paying more attention to the row and column headers, to the font choices, to the gridlines they aren’t getting what’s important. Give your draft table to a buddy at work and ask them if they can read it easily, it’s a great test to see if you are on the right track.