{"id":1423,"date":"2014-02-26T10:06:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-26T18:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.technet.microsoft.com\/dataplatforminsider\/2014\/02\/26\/data-visualizations\/"},"modified":"2024-01-22T22:49:01","modified_gmt":"2024-01-23T06:49:01","slug":"data-visualizations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/sql-server\/blog\/2014\/02\/26\/data-visualizations\/","title":{"rendered":"Data Visualizations"},"content":{"rendered":"
A couple of weeks back was a really exciting time for us. Less than a year after we released Office 365 for Businesses, we announced the general availability of Power BI for Office 365. You may have read previous blog articles by Quentin Clark on \u201c<\/i>Making Big Data Work for Everyone<\/i><\/a>\u201d<\/i> and Kamal Hathi on \u201c<\/i>Simplifying Business Intelligence through Power BI for Office 365<\/i><\/a>\u201d<\/i>. In this article, we\u2019ll outline how we think about visualizations.<\/p>\n While a list of items is great for entering or auditing data, data visualizations are a great way to distill information to what matters most that is understandable quickly. They work by engaging visual parts of our brains, which are inherently designed to detect patterns quickly. On the left, for example, we have a list of research grants, on the right a summarization of the overall amounts by month of the year which is a much easier way to understand the relative spikes in September and October. As you can see, visualizations are great for making us all more productive with data.<\/p>\nWhy Visualizations Matter<\/h1>\n