What Is the Best Visualization Software?
Big data is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. Businesses collect large amounts of data from disparate sources daily. Business data provides actionable insights that aid in decision making, trend recognition, conducting analyses, and setting business goals. Datasets are useless if business users don’t understand how to leverage them. Enter data visualization, the best way for business users to leverage the power of raw data and present it in different ways that are easy to interpret and act on.
What’s Data Visualization?
Data visualization creates visual representations of the information within a dataset. There are countless ways to create visualizations. Some of the most common data visualization techniques include pie charts, bar charts, histograms, heat maps, area charts, scatter plots, box-and-whisker plots, infographics, diagrams, and heat maps.
Leveraging data visualization tools allows business users to build custom dashboards that can be accessed by team members. A dashboard can represent a single dataset or multiple datasets. It may feature fixed, preset visualizations, or it may feature visualizations with custom reports and display options. Dashboards also allow you to customize permissions based on business function, team member role, or personal preference.
Not all data visualization software is created equal. Some interactive visualization tools are more complex than others. Choosing the best visualization software depends on your business needs. A great option for B2B SaaS businesses is the CPQ software solution from Configure One. The lightweight, interactive data visualization platform features real-time 3D and 2D visualizations that allow customers to choose different options when designing a product.
Real-time visualizations let customers interact with photorealistic models and animations that show exactly how a final product will function and look. Interactive visualization improves customer engagement because they can explore different product specifications to find the perfect combination of options. Animations and product snapshots help reduce errors and save money because everyone will be on the same page about the final functionality and look of the completed product.
Why It Matters
Visual depictions of data sets make it easier to digest large amounts of data and draw actionable insights. Data visualization effectively puts data in the hands of business users across an organization. Effectively leveraging business intelligence results in data-driven processes that better align with business goals. Visualization tools are also an effective means of communicating important data findings with external users such as stakeholders and investors. Some of the most important team members for any business that leverages data visualization today are those with data science skills, such as data analysts and data scientists.
Types of Visualization Tools
Data visualization tools can create automatic visualizations or allow for custom creations. Free-data visualization tools are better suited for building infographics rather than running advanced data analytics, such as Tableau Gallery and Microsoft Power BI. Advanced visualization tools can adapt visualizations in real time using machine-learning algorithms that query real-time data across multiple data sources. Data visualization tools can generate artistic depictions of data in many different ways, from simple and crude to complex and attractive. Most visualizations stem from traditional templates that can be customized based on analytics.
Data visualization is one of the best practices for any business that generates business data across different sources. Pie charts, bar graphs, and line graphs have been helping business users make better decisions for decades. Today’s visualization tools are changing the types of data and the size of datasets that can be visually represented and offer more sophisticated ways to share reports and communicate key metrics that aid business intelligence. These visualizations are only as strong as the quality of the data leveraged to create them. It’s imperative to use accurate data to avoid generating misleading visualizations or insights.