Are you at the point where you need to decide on the type of chart or table you are going to use in your visual display? Where are you in the data visualization development process? Remember your decision can be changed later on so sometimes just picking one and getting started is a good choice.

Generally, if your chart is describing data over time, you would first consider a line chart. Bar charts are great for displaying categorical data and are the most popular chart.

There are lots of charts and graphs to choose from. Some are better at communicating than others. In Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic’s book Storytelling with Data, she focusses on the following 12 visuals. I will add the treemap and maps (geospatial) to the bottom of her list.

• Text
• Table
• Heatmap
• Scatterplot
• Line
• Slopegraph
• Vertical Bar
• Horizontal Bar
• Stacked Vertical Bar
• Stacked Horizontal Bar
• Waterfall
• Square Area
• Treemap
• Maps