Brooke Ownbey

Software Documentation
5/8/12

Review of Show Me the Numbers by Stephen Few

Quantitative informationthe numberstakes us out of the realm

of assumption, feeling, guesswork, gut instinct, intuition, and bias,
into the realm of reliable fact based on measurable evidence.
Stephen Few

In Stephen Fews book, Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to
Enlighten, Few tackles the problem of poorly designed tables and graphs. Few assert that
many people have lost sight of the purpose of quantitative displays, which he defines as,
to provide the reader with important, meaningful, and useful insight (10). Now that
software such as Microsoft Excel is widely available, anyone can make charts, but not
everyone makes well-designed charts.

Brooke Ownbey
Software Documentation
5/8/12
I concentrated on the chapters that were directly related to graph design. One of
the first things I noticed (besides the beautiful document design) was that Few does not
like pie charts. He says that they communicate poorly because our visual perception is
not designed to accurately assign quantitative values to 2-D areas (Few 60). Humans are
great at noticing differences, but not so great at assigning numerical values to said
differences. The red piece of the pie might be bigger than the blue piece, but by how
much?
Another thing that stood out was that Few is anti-3-D graphs. I agree that 3-D
graphs in their extreme are obnoxious and distract from the data, but I think subtle 3-D
can lend depth to a presentation. Take a look at these two charts:
5
5
4.5
4
3.5
3
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
0

4
3
2
1
0

The chart on the left is almost impossible to read. The chart on the right, or the subtle 3-D
chart, is much clearer. Few is a bit of a minimalist when it comes to design. I can respect
the elegance and simplicity in his chart designs, but a little subtle 3-D never hurt anyone.
Few makes a good point when he says, tables and graphs dont just display
numbers; they present them in a manner that relates them to something, such as to time
or to one another, in order to reveal a meaningful message (12). Some of the

Brooke Ownbey
Software Documentation
5/8/12
relationships graphs can show are nominal comparisons, time series, rankings, part-towhole, deviation, distribution, and correlation. Line graphs are excellent at showing
relationships between data and time. For example, say we want to look at a students test
grades for last year. The line graph would make it easy to see trends over the course of
the year.

Sales are on the Rise!

Stagnant Sales.

19.9

25

19.8

20

19.7
19.6

15

19.5
10

19.4
19.3

19.2
19.1
Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Jun

0
Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Jun

Graphs can be used to manipulate data. This is bad. Here is an example:

Both graphs show the exact same data, but the graph on the left has been manipulated to
make a small jump look huge. They did that by changing the scale. The vertical axis
should almost always start at zero. If it doesnt, then it is your responsibility to draw
attention to the fact that it started at a number greater than zero.
I enjoyed this book a great deal! It was easy to read and had lots of excellent
examples to make Fews points come alive. Bottom line: make sure your graphs are
communicating the data accurately and easily.