# Composing Pages with Charts

**Guidelines**

* The essential question in data analysis is:  "Compared to what"?  To understand your data, you need to place it in a context. 
* Most interesting problems are essentially multivariate: there are a variety of factors that interact. Include many dimensions of data in your analysis. 
* "Follow your data" when you are analyzing by changing the display, the data, or the charts to show you new relationships as you try to understand what you are seeing. 
* A design strategy that is often effective is:  "Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand" (HCIL).  Provide an overall chart that covers the problem space.  You should try to use a multidimensional chart for the overview (e.g., scatter plot, Multiscape, ParaBox, Data Constellations, Map, Time Table). Use filtering and zooming to focus on a subset, then explore that subset by examining its details. 

When you are designing a visual display of your data, consider these factors:

* Show as much data as you can:  a chart can comfortably accommodate one to two orders of magnitude more data than a spreadsheet can. 
* Extract data at the granularity of items that you want to understand.  For example, if the raw data is transactions, aggregate to higher level entities (e.g., products, people, relationships). 
* First choose charts that directly reflect relationships you are interested in:
  * Characteristics of a field:  Bar, Pie, Line Chart, Histogram 
  * Interaction of two things:  Scatter Plot, Multiscape 
  * Subsets over multiple fields:  ParaBox 
  * Outliers over multiple fields:  ParaBox 
  * Interactions between multiple fields:  Data Sheet, ParaBox 
  * Relationships:  Data Constellations 
  * Events over time:  Time Table 
  * Geospatial data:  Maps 
  * Details about data or subsets (often used for the "details on demand"):  Data Sheet 
* Increase the dimensionality of your analysis by combining multiple charts into a page. Selection and coloring increase the number of dimensions that can be correlated. Filtering provides drill down to focus on a subset. (See [Visual Discovery](https://help.advizorsolutions.com/v7.2+/charts-and-visual-discovery/visual-discovery) for more details.) 

**Too many Charts on a Page?**

Here are things to try if you find your Page to be unable to fit all of the charts you think you need:

* Reexamine objective of the Page: 
  * What questions/problems is it trying to address? 
  * Are all charts needed in that Page? 
  * Are there other Visuals that might be as good (or better) with less space usage? 
* Use multiple Pages 
* Use Data Hierarchies 
* Orient bars in Bar Charts sideways (except for time-related dimensions) 
* Reduce font sizes (especially titles) 
* Eliminate titles if redundant w/axes labels 
* Align filters in two columns on left and right or along left and bottom 
* Use Full Screen button (client tool only)