- after Tufte. Tufte writes about brilliant, eloquent graphic design. Few writes about competent, legible business presentation. Tufte writes about good art, Few writes about servicable craft. If you've ever seen data presented in Excel, Word, or (god forbid) PowerPoint, you know how much we need competent craft.
The book is gently paced. It's for people who need to present numbers, but may not be wholly comfortable with numbers. It takes the reader by the hand, and walks through a series of very basic steps in reasoning about how a chart communicates, or fails to.
The book is very much oriented towards the chart and graph types that Excel can produce. Like it or not, that makes sense. Excel is what most readers have most acess to, and is what causes some of the ugliest problems. This book addresses those problems.
Few illustrates his points with a number of examples, both good and bad ones. He presents problems to solve, and presents answers to many of them. It's a textbook, and a good one. Its main message is, "Less is better."
This is for anyone who presents information, and for anyone who creates presentation software. I recommend this one.
//wiredweird
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Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten (Hardcover)
This book should be the bible for anyone who is attempting to grow a business. It is effecively designed to nurture any entrepreneur venture. It is great!
This is an important read well worth your valuable time.By using the advice in this book, leaders and businesspeople will be able to communicate more effectively using straightforward, lucid conversation.When you apply Booher's ten key strategies to your personal and organizational communications, you'll avoid huge productivity drains such as rework, mistakes, and misunderstandings.The author uses clever alliteration to help the reader remember the ten strategies: Correct, Complete, Clear, unClear, Consistent, Credible, Concerned, Current, Competent, and Circular.Booher not only provides the rationale of why each strategy works but specific tactics to immediately apply them to your written and verbal messages.You'll discover why truth-telling is key to productivity; how your style may be creating a climate of paranoia; what to never put in email; and how to immediately engage someone in conversation.The end result: Powerful, purposeful prose that will help you obtain your communication goals.