Why bother with visualizing data when you have a perfectly good spreadsheet? Allow me a very simple example to make the case that visuals provide the human brain with analytical abilities that columns of data simply cannot.
Consider the data in the spreadsheet above and try to look through the numbers to find those with best performance. That’s a time-consuming and tedious effort for the brain!
Next, take a look at the chart. In a glance, you can easily pick out the winners due to the help of size, shape, and color.
Science tells us that our brains efficiently process information by visual senses such as size, color, proportion and proximity. Spreadsheets fall short in supplying those cues to the brain while visual representations provide the senses with all they need to process the information and reach important conclusions and insights.
