So You Want to Pick a Dataviz Platform

Ok Phil, your first ever column got 2,000 clicks in two days. Now. You need to keep that momentum going, boy! Failure to make a good article here means you’ll lose all the goodwill you got on your first one. And it’s even worse for you since, ya know, your first article was literally about embracing failure. So … hey, no pressure.

Now. Let’s open with something solid. How about …

There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

WOW! That was teeeeeerrible. Offensive to animal rights people and a dumb metaphor in the first sentence. Amazing. You have a gift. Try again, and make sure to delete this before the editor sees it.

Folks pretty desperately want to figure out data visualization. Well, good news! The industry wants to help. Articles, classes, and videos spend untold minutes, nay, perhaps even hours telling you how to tackle the mountain of libraries and apps that exist now to make a chart.

Even so, they may fail to some degree. There’s a mountain of articles, sure, alongside a similar mountain of apps and techniques to use them. But does this pseudo-helpful mountain address one key question that newcomers ask me? Does the mountain peak look down from its lofty perch and hear: