Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten
Product Description:
Subjects: Business communication & presentation, Business Research, Communication In Business, Mathematics, Business/Economics, Science/Mathematics, Graphic Methods, Mathematics / Graphic Methods, Business Communication - General,
Show Me the Numbers
The book is good for someone that has never used or dealt with the design and graphic presentation of data. This book is NOT for someone who has skill in developing tables and charts for presentation, and is looking for new and different ways to present data.
A Reference for Tables & Simple Charts
A complete book on tables, and simple graphs. Stephen Few seems to follow the same scarcity principles as Edward Tufte when it comes to "ink". Here the additional bonus is that the author compares many "good" yet subtly different charts so that you get a good intuitive feel for selecting the most appropriate one. He plays with contrasts, colors, type, alignement, column ordering and more. After reading this book, you will know how to make well designed tables and charts that can really make the numbers speak.
Practical Tufte
This book is a gold mine of practical information for the creation of tables and graphs. I really like the Tufte books as well, but have found them to be more general and difficult to apply. Few takes those ideas, adds many of his own and shows the nitty gritty of creating useful charts. I've been looking for a book like this for a long, long time.
Guidelines for helpful book reviews
This is not a review of "Show Me the Numbers." I wrote this book, so I can hardly review it objectively. My purpose here is to write a review of reviews, or more accurately stated, to suggest some guidelines for writing helpful reviews. I decided to do this, because, as an author, it is painful to occasionally read reviews of books that are either uninformed or based on expectations that have nothing to do with the book.
Here are two guidelines that I believe every book reviewer should take to heart.
Guideline #1: Don't review a book that you haven't actually read.
I once had a MBA student of mine write a scathing review of one of my books--a book he had never even seen--because I gave him a "B" grade rather than the "A" he wanted on an assignment. People read reviews to learn about a book. If you haven't read the book, you're not qualified to tell them anything useful, and you're certainly not qualified to judge its merits. Simply knowing that you don't share the author's point of view doesn't give you the right to criticize the book.
Guideline #2: Judge the merits of a book by how well it achieves what it set out to achieve.
If the author claims to do something that the book fails to do, or does it but does so poorly, it deserves low marks. If it fulfills its stated intentions and does so well, it deserves high marks. If you wanted something different from the book's stated purpose, it isn't the author's fault that you didn't get what you wanted.
If you follow these two simple and honorable guidelines and express yourself clearly, you will provide other potential readers with helpful information. If you fail to follow these guidelines, you will not only serve other readers poorly, you might also erroneously discredit a book that someone labored over with great care.
In the spirit of these guidelines, let me say about the book "Show Me the Numbers" what I stated clearly in the book itself. This book was written primarily for everyday people with little or no statistical training who wish to present quantitative information clearly, accurately, and compellingly. It is a comprehensive and practical guide for table and graph design that was written especially to address the needs of this audience in a way that is accessible to this audience. Although many statisticians use this book to improve their ability to present data to non-statisticians, it is not intended as a guide to the advanced graphical displays that statisticians sometimes need. This book is also software agnostic--meaning that the principles and practices that I teach in it can be applied to almost any software that produces tables and graphs. As such, it is not a "how to" guide for creating graphs using a particular software product, such as Microsoft Excel. It can certainly teach you how to use the charting functionality of Excel more effectively, but it does so by teaching simple design principles and practices, not by telling you where to find particular graphing functions that might be hiding somewhere in Excel's menus and dialog boxes.
You will find that "Show Me the Numbers" has only received low ratings from Amazon reviewers who wanted a different book; one that was written for a different audience and purpose. Everyone who has actually read it and judged its merits based on how well it achieves what I set out to do, as clearly described in the book and its promotional materials, has given it high marks for the useful, well-expressed information that it provides.
Take care,
Stephen Few
Somewhat helpful
Few applies the Tufte principles, but with less brilliance. Many of his examples are useful - but the book lacks examples of graphical sophistication. The book may help those looking to simplify the business-class Excel experience - but anyone involved with serious scientific data graphics need to look elsewhere. Consider William Cleveland.
