Reaction: Effectively Communicating Numbers

This is an amazing paper on how to visually represent numerical data. The author states the importance of tabular representation, where representing data visually doesn't convey the message as it is expected to, which shows that he is not biased towards complex graphical visualizations. The paper also provides information about how to represent the relationship between quantitative data effectively. The importance of simplicity in visual representation is well explained. The paper gives us a hint of when to use what graphical representation. It also gives us a insight that even if the three dimensional visualization tools are complex, but will help us in representing quantitative data more effectively when compared to two dimensional representation, we have to go for it. The author also stresses the importance of not making the graphical representation clumsy, by avoiding unneccessary data. This is kind of intuitive. The article is oriented towards business requirements(the example the author used), which I feel should have been generalized, as the statements he made can be applied to graphically representing data in any context. Overall, the paper presents a nice organized view of the types of graphical representation of data and how effectively quantitative data can be represented in different situations.