Show Me the Numbers - 2nd Edition by Stephen Few (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Addressing the prevalent issue of poorly designed quantitative information presentations, this accessible, practical, and comprehensive guide teaches how to properly create tables and graphs for effective and efficient communication. The critical numbers that measure the health, identify the opportunities, and forecast the future of organizations are often misrepresented because few people are trained to design accurate, informative materials, but this manual helps put an end to misinformation. This revised edition of the highly successful book includes updated figures and 91 additional pages of content, including new chapters about quantitative narrative and current misuses of graphs--such as donut, circle, unit, and funnel charts--and new appendices that cover constructing table lens displays and box plots in Excel and useful color palettes for presentation materials.

Review Quotes

"A must-read for anyone developing reports or dashboards." --Cindi Howson, founder, BI Scorecard, and author, Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App

"Each concept builds upon the previous in a logical and easy-to-follow sequence, leading the reader steadily through the material, eager to see what is on the next page. In my work with health-care professionals, I list Show Me the Numbers as a must-have for my clients' reference libraries." --Katherine S. Rowell, founder, Katherine S. Rowell & Associates

"If you are looking for practical, easy-to-follow guidelines for presenting numerical data, this is the best book there is. Stephen Few's examples are elegant, and his advice is right on the money." --Colin Ware, professor, University of New Hampshire, and author, Information Visualization: Perception for Design

"Not just 'a' book on statistical graphics, it is 'the' book on statistical graphics. No other book has influenced my own view on the visual presentation of quantitative evidence as much as this. A true masterpiece." --Alberto Cairo, author, The Functional Art

"Stephen Few is the master of creating simplicity and meaning through the clear visualization of data. Show Me the Numbers should be required reading for every businessperson, researcher, student, and teacher. A contemporary classic!" --Garr Reynolds, author, Presentation Zen and The Naked Presenter

"With calm clarity and well-crafted examples, Stephen Few explains how to make comprehensible and even compelling tables and graphs. In a world with petabytes of data, compact informative tables and graphs are more important than ever. Their quality is not measured in byte counts, but in insights, deep understandings, and confident decisions. Show Me the Numbers will raise expectations and guide data hackers to become information Rembrandts." --Ben Shneiderman, professor, University of Maryland, and coauthor, Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think

"With this second edition, Show Me the Numbers has been transformed from a practical, engaging, and trustworthy guide for displaying numbers into the most comprehensive reference available for anyone who seeks to present data in enlightening ways, even to those with numberphobia." --Stacey Barr, performance measure specialist

About the Author

Stephen Few is the founder of the consultancy Perceptual Edge. He speaks, teaches, and consults around the world and writes the quarterly Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter. He is the author of Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data and Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis. He lives in Berkeley, California.