Statistics: Power from Data!
5 Data Visualization

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Graphs and charts are effective visual tools because they present information quickly and easily. It is not surprising then, that graphs are commonly used by print and electronic media. Sometimes, data can be better understood when presented by a graph than by a table because the graph can reveal a trend or comparison.

Students also find that graphs are easy to use because graphs are made up of lines, dots and blocks—all geometric forms that are simple and quick for students to draw. In the world of statistics, graphs display the relationship between variables or show the value spread of a given variable or phenomenon.

This section aims to describe the graphs the most often used to visualize data. There are many other graphs that can be used in different contexts, such as the heat map, the tree map, the bubble chart, the area chart, the radar chart as well as the box and whisker plot that has been presented in a previous section.


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