Getting Started with Data Visualization: From Analysis to Aesthetics

Data visualization is the art of creating maximum impact through an insightful representation of your data. It involves selecting the right chart type, creating consistent and neat aesthetics, being contextual, answering the right questions, and designing the right interactivity. As you can see, a lot of things have to go right to create a powerful visualization, making it the right decision to learn data visualization.

Why is Data Visualization Important?

To understand the full force of data visualization, watch Hans Rosling’s most famous TED talk or better still, interact with the Gapminder tool to explore insights about the changes in world income and life expectancy since 1800.

Human eyes are more drawn to colors and patterns, which is why data visualization tools and technologies have found their way to the business information systems and contribute towards analyzing massive data and information for making data-driven decisions. Data visualization has helped to understand trends, outliers, and patterns in data at both individual and organizational levels. Its usage is as basic as for managing some data of regular expenditure at home, to as advanced as managing organizational data.

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Learning Data Visualization

Since data visualization is critical to advanced analytics, big data, and data science, that’s why it is highly recommended that every data scientist develops data visualization and analytical skills. To help you, this article lists some of the best data visualization courses available online.
Those of us working in analytics-related roles know that there is a lot of effort that goes into extracting, cleaning, and loading data before it is ready to be processed for visualization. In this scope of this discussion, however, let’s assume that the hard part of getting data is done and we have to only focus on the harder part of creating impactful visualizations.

In this article, we have curated a list of courses that can help you get started with data visualization. We have divided this article based on the current skills and tools that you are comfortable with. Even if you’re not a programmer, we expect some understanding of analytics (could even be in excel). For keeping the list short and powerful, we have based this list on the most powerful tools/technologies for data visualization, such as Tableau, R, Python, D3, PowerBI, etc.

Let’s have a look at these data visualization courses:

Data Visualization: A Practical Approach for Absolute Beginners by Microsoft on edX

Course Description – The course targets data visualization beginners and helps them to learn the theories and techniques of data visualization for data analysis. In this course, you will learn about building the most-used and simplest data visualizations and chart types, and get an idea of how basic data visualization artifacts are improved by interaction, design, and the science of visualization.

Course Details
Duration – 4 weeks
Efforts – 2 -3 hours per week
Difficulty Level – Beginner
Subject – Data Analysis & Statistics
Language: English

Course Inclusive

• Module 1: Visual Literacy
• Module 2: Visual Analysis
• Module 3: Visualizations for Business
• Module 4: Visualizations of Tomorrow

Data Visualization with Tableau Specialization on Coursera

Program Details
Rating – 4.5 stars (6,662 ratings)
Duration – 6 Months
Skill Level – Beginner

Program Description – The course is ranked among the best online courses in Data Visualization. This specialization is designed for every person who intends to learn data visualization without having any prior experience in Tableau. It will help you to generate powerful reports and dashboards, which can help in making smart business decisions using business data. The specialization also includes a capstone project at the end of the course, to help create visualizations, dashboards, and data models, and present the data before business leaders of a fictitious company.

This specialization includes 5 courses –

Course 1 – Fundamentals of Visualization with Tableau

This is the first course of the specialization and teaches the basics of data visualization using Tableau, and will help you to see and understand data in a descriptive way. In this 15 hours long course, you will learn to –

• Install Tableau Public Software and create a visualization
• Examine and navigate the Tableau Public workspace
• Practice and connect to different data sources
• Examine ways to define your project

Course 2 – Essential Design Principles for Tableau

This is the second part of the main course that will help you to analyze and apply essential design principles to Tableau visualizations. By the end of the previous course, you should get a complete idea about the Tableau tool and have a basic knowledge of the data visualization concepts. In this course, you will explore how to –

• Examine and improve an ineffective visualization
• Examine and improve an ineffective visualization
• Apply visualization best practices
• Create and design visualizations that work best for the target audience

Course 3 – Visual Analytics with Tableau

The third course of specialization dives deeper into charting, dates, table calculations, and mapping using Tableau tools. You will also get to learn about charting guidelines, create custom and quick table calculations and parameters. The course covers –

• Create a chart using Tableau
• Create dates using calculated fields
• Customize table calculations
• Customize and create dual layer maps

Course 4 – Creating Dashboards and Storytelling with Tableau

With the help of this course, you can create a powerful story using your data points for maximum impact. You will also learn to apply advanced functions within Tableau, such as hierarchies, actions, and parameters to guide user interactions. This is a 19 hours course that enables you to learn to –

• Combine the data and follow the best practices to present your story
• Create calculated fields for KPIs to build a figure that will be used to measure progress in the data
• Assemble a dashboard
• Analyze concepts and techniques for compelling storytelling with data

Course 5 – Data Visualization with Tableau Project

This is a project-driven course that requires you to complete a project stepwise where you will find the business data, import it in Tableau, create a dashboard, and extract meaningful insights. It will take around 16 hours for you to complete this course and you will learn to –

• Develop a project proposal
• Assess the quality of the data and perform exploratory analysis
• Create KPIs and dashboards and assess your analysis
• Create your data story and write a narrative to accompany your visualization

Instructors

Suk S. Brar, M.B.A.: Lead Business Consultant, Blue Shield of California
Govind Acharya: Principal Analyst – Budget and Institutional Analysis
Hunter Whitney: Sr. Consultant, Author, Instructor – University of California, Davis

Data Science: Visualization (using R) by Harvard University on edX

Course Description – This course is a part of the Professional Certificate Program in Data Science of Harvard University and covers the fundamentals of data visualization and exploratory data analysis. It will also cover the ways of handling different types of mistakes, biases, systematic errors, and other unexpected issues in data that may lead to incorrect interpretation and how they should be handled with care. The course instructor is Rafael Irizarry, Professor of Biostatistics, T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
In this course, you will learn –

• Data visualization principles
• How to communicate data-driven findings
• How to use ggplot2 to create custom plots
• The weaknesses of several widely used plots and why you should avoid them

Course Details

Duration – 8 weeks
Efforts – 1 – 2 hours per week
Difficulty Level – Beginner
Subject – Data Science
Language: English

Introduction to Data Visualization in Python on DataCamp

Course Description – This course will help you to enhance your Python skills and develop a stronger foundation in data visualization in Python. The course will cover topics like customizing graphics, plotting two-dimensional arrays, statistical graphics, and working with time series and image data. You will also get to learn about the Matplotlib library and get an overview of Seaborn, a package for statistical graphics.
Course Inclusive

• Customizing plots (Free course)
• Plotting 2D arrays
• Statistical plots with Seaborn
• Analyzing time series and images

D3.js Data Visualization Fundamentals on Pluralsight

Course Description – This is a beginner-level course that would help you to learn data visualization with the usage of D3.js (data-driven documents) for creating presentable and insightful data visualizations. Starting with the core concepts of D3.js version 3, the course also includes examples of building data visualizations and business dashboards. It is a 4-5 hours long video.

This course requires you to have a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Course Inclusive

• The Basics
• Basic Charting
• Working with Data Part 1 – External Data Sources
• Working with Data Part 2 – Getting Data from Web APIs
• Enhancing Your Viz Part 1 – Scales and Axis
• Enhancing Your Viz Part 2 – Interactivity
• Mapping

Data Visualization and Communication with Tableau by Coursera

Course Description – You would learn to communicate business-relevant implications of data analyses, structure your data analysis projects, and streamline your analyses and highlight their implications efficiently using visualizations in Tableau.

Course Inclusive

• About this Specialization and Course
• Data Visualization with Tableau
• Dynamic Data Manipulation and Presentation in Tableau
• Your Communication Toolbox: Visualizations, Logic, and Stories
• Final Project

The Complete Tableau Bootcamp for Data Visualization by Udemy

Course Description – In this course, you will learn data visualization as well as the basics of Tableau 10, tackle your own data projects with real-world data sets, and create Tableau dashboards.

Course Inclusive –Intro to Data Visualization and Tableau

• Visual Analytics
• Maps and Location
• Colour Vision Deficiency
• Advanced Calculations
• Dashboards and Stories
• Advanced Dashboard 1
• Advanced Dashboard 2

Data Visualization by Udacity

Course Description – With the help of this course, you would learn data visualizations model and dashboards building, and drafting presentations using storytelling techniques, visualizations, and animations to provide data-driven recommendations.

Course Inclusive –

• Intro to Data Visualization
• Dashboard Designs
• Data Storytelling
• Advanced Data Storytelling

3D Data Visualization for Science Communication by Coursera

Course Description –

You will get to explore the basics of 3D scientific data visualization, with an emphasis on science communication and cinematic design. By the end of the course you would be able to interpret/analyze visualizations and create your own visualizations, understand how a scientific visualization can be made meaningful, work with image-making software, and much more.

Course Inclusive –

Week 1: Course Orientation
Week 2: Data
Week 3: Meaningful Communication
Week 4: Cinematic Presentation

Data Visualization & Dashboarding with R Specialization by Coursera

Course Description – This is a specialization for those who wish to learn data visualization using R. this specialization includes five courses, and you will get hands-on experience working with R to create static and interactive data visualizations and publish them on the web.

Course Inclusive –

Course 1 – Getting Started with Data Visualization in R
Course 2 – Data Visualization in R with ggplot2
Course 3 – Advanced Data Visualization with R
Course 4 – Publishing Visualizations in R with Shiny and flexdashboard
Course 5 – Data Visualization Capstone

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