This Week on Nightingale: What’s the Difference Between a Report and a Visualization?

What’s the difference between a report and a visualization?

That sounds like the set-up of a terrible data viz joke, but it’s a serious question. And we have a serious answer:

In his piece, “Less Reporting, More Visualization,” Dan Gastineau implores us to stop referring to our visualizations as reports. Reports, he says, “make no effort to clarify or convey a point of view.” Visualizations, meanwhile, are active participants in wringing the truth out of data. He also offers a handy mantra (you’ll have to click to find out) for creating visualizations that truly matter to the people who see them.

So, if we don’t want to use the word “report,” what options are we left with? One handy way to display and make sense of information is with a dashboard, and Rasmus Christiansen has this covered in his article, “How to Create a B2B Dashboard.” The piece answers some basic questions (What is a dashboard?) as well as explores the different types and offers some guidance on creating your own.

Often, our visualizations contain narrative elements. Lorenzo Amabili reviewed Data-Driven Storytelling, a must-read for practitioners and researchers that includes a good mix of theory and practical guidelines.

So, reporting versus visualizing. If reporting is simply relaying information, visualizing creates meaning from it. Think of a report as a hulking block of marble; a visualization is the polished statue. But know that often our visualizations will reveal a truth that is messy, or inconvenient.

In “A Messy Guide for Dealing With Messy Truths,” Oren Bahari summarized a conversation from the Data Visualization Society’s Slack channels about what to do with messy truths and stakeholder conflict. Everyone knows what it’s like to face complex problems where the more you learn, it seems like the less you know. And if you work with data, you’ve surely faced situations where your data didn’t tell the story you hoped it would. Those situations can be messy, but the advice in Oren’s piece can help you next time one arises.