Visualization type rules

This section deserves a whole separate book and is interlinked with many other disciplines like storytelling, communication, and persuasion; as such, we won’t take the time here to delve into a lengthy list of visualization-type rules but, rather, highlight a few frequently discussed ones. We will consider keeping simple shapes versus complex ones and the effective use of pie charts.

Keep shapes simple

Too many shape details impede comprehension. This is because shape details draw the user’s focus away from the data. Consider the following exercise using two different shopping cart images.

Let’s look at the following exercise steps:

1. Open the workbook associated with this chapter and navigate to the Simple Shopping Cart worksheet. Note that the visualization is a scatter plot that shows the top-10-selling subcategories in terms of total sales and profits.
2. Navigate to the Shapes directory located in the My Tableau...