Now there are different types of graphs but overall what are good graphs?

How do we produce good

graphs? What are the things that we need to keep in mind? Again it's an art form, it's not an exact
science but good graphs are always clear and well labelled. Think about do I have titles on my graph?
Do I have access titles on my graph? Do I need to have those additional labels like on top of the bars
like those data point labels? Maybe, maybe not, but think about that. Good graphs are concise and
informative. Think about why are you doing the graph, what is the purpose of the graph, and based on
that try and focus the reader on the substance, what you want them to extract from it, not the form not
the pretty colour or the whatever it is. Now we use colour, we use nice pictures, we use all of that to
help make it more attractive but fundamentally it's about the substance. What is the information you're
trying to convey? Then, we use nice colours and help it out but it's not just all about fancy nice
colours that look good but don't display the information, that's not okay. So step one, we want to be
concise, informative, focus on the substance then we make it look pretty. Now generally good graphs
encourage comparisons between categories, trends over time, usually that's what we're we're looking
at because visually our eyes are very good at picking comparisons. And finally good graphs should be
accurate, they should not be misleading, we should use accurate figures, and when we talk about
ethics we'll talk a little bit more about that. So, graphical techniques, there's a saying in English that a
picture is worth a thousand words and that's very true here. So we're trying to summarise a lot of
information, it would have taken tables and lots and lots of text to convey this but we show one graph
and the reader can quickly see all that information. Now as managers you’re time poor, so this is
really helpful to you to find out that information quickly and efficiently to communicate it with your
team, with your bosses, with other managers. So really think about and when you're writing reports,
whatever you're doing, is there a graph here when you're presenting data, is there a graph that might
be a nice way to present this that will quickly and easily communicate this information. When you're
asking people to prepare and do some data analysis for you, yeah tell them to think about hey I would
like to see these results in a graph because that's easier for me to quickly see it. Then give me all the
other information and the backup information but a nice summary graph can do a lot of good. But we
need to use the right graph. So we've seen bar and pie charts, really good when we can break things
down into categories and either focus on the contribution to the whole or comparing the different
categories. We looked at histogram, for quantitative variables, numerical variables, the numbers
breaking them into categories then we can look at frequencies and relative frequencies. We looked at
line plots for a time series graph so we could see what was happening over time. Finally, we looked at
a scatter plot to see the relationship between two graphs. But now it's time to actually do this in Excel.
So now that we've seen these let's have a play in Excel, to make sure we can calculate and produce
them in Excel. Good news is, very easy, so not too difficult but there's lots of different options so you
need to spend some time in playing around to see what's happening.