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| View Larger Image | Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten
by Stephen Few
| | List Price: | $45.00 | | Price: | $29.70 | | You Save: | $15.30 (34%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 22152 | | Studio: | Analytics Press | | | Binding: | Hardcover | | Number Of Pages: | 280 | | Publication Date: | September 01, 2004 | | Publisher: | Analytics Press |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Tables and graphs can more adequately communicate important business information when they reflect the good design practices discussed in this practical guide to effective table and graph design. Information is provided on the fundamental concepts of table and graph design, the numbers and knowledge most suitable for display in a graphic form, the best tabular means to communicate certain ideas, and the component-level aspects of design. Analysts, technicians, and managers will appreciate the solid theory behind this outline for ensuring that tables and graphs present quantitative business information in a truthful, attractive format that facilitates better decision making.
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CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 25 reviews)
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Very good if you target your reading 
If you are like me, you are probably a very busy person. You pick this book up because you would like to improve a certain aspect of your employment skills: tables or graphs. This isn't a skill that will make or break your career, so it is something you want to be able to pick up quickly.
One great thing about this book is that you can flip through the pages and see many great and obviously poor examples - Few makes the contrasts between these examples very clear. Without reading a word, you would probably pick up a few tips.
If you read this book in a specific manner, you can pick up some skills very quickly. The chapters on designing tables and graphs (mainly chapters 7, 8, and 9) are invaluable.
The problem I had was that I had to read through a lot of somewhat extraneous material to find the real meat of the book. While Visual Perception is interesting, for instance, I didn't feel the need to know so much about it. A lot of the material could have been shortened.
Also, if you are well-versed in working with numbers, you should probably skip the first couple of chapters - I'm sure you already know this material.
But overall, thanks to Few for taking a rather elusive topic to most of us and making it crystal clear!
August 29, 2008 | |
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.
April 09, 2008 | |
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.
January 24, 2008 | |
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.
January 18, 2008 | |
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
December 17, 2007 | |
SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
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