New book announcement! "More Practical Charts" will be published on Jan. 16!

 
 

You read that right: MORE Practical Charts! 😉

My first book, Practical Charts, covers about 30 common chart types that are familiar to most audiences, such as bar charts, line charts, and maps. More Practical Charts covers 20 additional, more "advanced" chart types that tend to be unfamiliar to audiences without scientific or technical backgrounds:

  • Box plots

  • Merged histograms

  • Overlapping histograms

  • Distribution line charts

  • Distribution heatmaps

  • Merged bar charts

  • Scatter plots

  • Colored-dot scatter plots

  • Bubble charts

  • Scatter plot matrices

  • Pareto charts

  • Heatmaps

  • Shape size charts

  • Overlapping cycles charts

  • Cyclical heatmaps

  • Cycle plots

  • Strip plots

  • Jittered strip plots

  • Merged strip plots

  • Histograms

If you have a technical or scientific background, you might assume that most people know how to read most of these chart types but, after working with thousands of chart creators in hundreds of organizations, I've realized that that's not the case (unfortunately). There's a reason why you rarely see these chart types in the mainstream media: editors know that many readers/viewers won't understand how to read them.

If, however, you do create charts for relatively data-savvy audiences, by all means, pick up a copy of More Practical Charts 🙂. The book will be published on January 16th, but you can pre-order your copy now to get it shipped to you on the publication date. It's relatively short (about 100 pages) and is priced at less than half the list price of Practical Charts.

Why split these 20 chart types out into a separate book? Well, a large fraction of my readers can't use these chart types because their audience would struggle too much to grasp them, or simply wouldn't be able to grasp them. I didn't want to force those chart creators to buy and read content from me that they'll never use in practice, so I packaged that content in a separate, optional companion book.

BTW...

Interested in taking my Practical Charts course and/or my Practical Dashboards course? Registration for my January live, online workshop is now open (but it's already 50% sold out and early-bird prices end January 8th, so don't wait too long if you plan on registering). I hope to see you (online) there!