Data Visualization in Business Intelligence

Here is the data:

Here is the data:

Which one is more appealing to you? You got the answer!

The form of visual representing of data is called "Data Visualization". This technique plays a very important role in Business Intelligence.

Normally, people will get lost because of large amount of data in one place. This is because humans are not efficient in dealing with tables. Especially, the complicated, related tables that connected with each other and one and another. Usually, for study purpose, researchers have to get involved in large amount of data, which makes them extremely difficult to find the inherent pattern.

Compared with that, humans are way better in dealing with graphical information. The graphics are not only more interesting and colorful to see, but also provide very neat and concise representations of raw data.

I remembered when I was in undergraduate, I usually get overwhelmed with raw data. Then I find a very good way to overcome this problem. I used MS Excel to plot all the data within one spreadsheet. This was a very good and smart solution. From graphs, I could identify trends, convergence, and other relations.

However, Excel can only handle relatively small amount of data. I am not talking about the spreadsheet width and height limitation. I am talking about the computing speed for Excel. It becomes a dead zombie when you try to calculate large amount of data for longer time period, for many attributes, or for simply large records. Clearly, it is not suitable for Big Data in BI.

However, Excel leads to a very convenient way to visualize data. It is widely used when people have doubts for small problem and want to solve it in seconds.

If you are interested, you can try using Excel to find hidden facts within raw data. You may wonder that you do not have sufficient data for analysis, even in Excel. Let's see if you have LinkedIn account, you better have, if you are a active job seeker, like me. LinkedIn has a lab that use Gephi, a open source app, to generate your connections in graphs. The only requirement is you must have 50+ connections in LinkedIn.

Here is the link:
http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/

The video illustrates the whole thing. You will find how amazing that you can visualize your own data and watch it growing everyday.

Isn't it better than the data table, like this?