How to Interpret Graphs and Charts Like a Pro?

How to interpret graphs and charts boils down to basic analytical skills and the nature of the visualization.

The latter is what this blog will focus on.

Why?

For a chart to complement a compelling data story, it has to be simple, relevant, and clear. So the nature of the visualization used in terms of clarity and relevance determines how the audience receives and acts on the data story.

The choice of visualization determines the ease of reading and interpreting insights. If you want to create a compelling data story that inspires audiences to take action, you need charts that lend clarity.

It’s clarity that makes charts easier to read and interpret for the audience. So you really need to do away with unnecessary kinds of stuff that block or clutter key insights informing the big idea (thesis statement).

We’ve rounded up valuable tips and strategies you can use to make your data story compelling using charts and graphs. We’ve also included tons of examples using video marketing data.

How to Interpret Graphs and Charts? 5 Things to Look For

In many ways, visualization is like cooking. You are the chef, and datasets, geometry, and color are your ingredients. A skilled chef, who knows how to prepare and combine ingredients and plate the cooked food, is likely to prepare a delicious meal.

Whereas the person who is only familiar with entering the time and power level on a microwave must either endure poor-tasting meals or stick only to the handful of good ones. People who understand the ingredients and know-how to cook have fewer limitations.

The skilled chef might even transform an average frozen dinner into a gourmet meal. You’ve got to improve your skills to serve high-level audiences tactfully.

Imagine you’re part of the audience that’s listening to a data story. How do you interpret graphs and charts used in the story?

Well, visual data is meant to be “read,” just like the text on a page. Images with data often contain crucial information that isn’t available elsewhere in a text.

Ask these questions when you encounter visual data in a data story:

  1. What is the topic?

Look for the title and reword it in your own words. For example, a chart of the number of pants sold in June may be titled “Number of Pants Sold in June.”

  2. How and What is being measured?

Look for labels to get an idea of what the graph is saying.

The labels tell you what variables or parameters are being displayed. For example, on a line or bar graph of the “Number of Pants Sold in June,” the x-axis might be the days of the month, and the y-axis might be the number of pants sold.

Ask yourself if the units make sense with what you know about the chart so far.

  3. Is color-coding used, and if so, how?

Color-coding is often used to add additional information to a graph without taking up extra space. Color itself represent meanings like green for positive and red for negative.

  4. Can I summarize this information in my own words?

Look for a trend or an insight that you find interesting and mentally form a sentence about it.

How to interpret graphs and charts? Draw conclusions based on the data, remember, you can reach conclusions faster with graphs than using a data table or a written description of the data.

Think like the audience of your story can help identify factors that will resonate with them. So always picture yourself in the shoes of the target audience as you craft a data story.

Interpreting charts is part of the grand scheme, which is listening and understanding a data story. Charts are just a medium for helping emphasize the analytical bit of the story and maintain the credibility of the whole thing.

There are lots of stories connected to one visualization, if one visualization is talking about sales in a month then you may be thinking of another visualization with sales by salesperson, sales by week, seasonal sales charts and list may go on.

How to Interpret a Chart Example?

Take a look at the chart above. Are you ready to interpret it? Let’s go.

Note: the human eye starts reading a chart from the left. So it’s imperative to place the scale on the left side.

• Title: The chart has a title: Sales order per person. This provides a clear context of what the chart is about. The title answers the question: what is the topic?
• Scale: on the left side (the Y-axis), the scale shows salespersons, and the X-axis shows the sales
• Color coding: there’s color coding to differentiate the current from the previous financial year, as shown by the small legend rectangle on the left bottom.

Let’s proceed to the insights part.

• The length of the bar representing the number of orders by salesperson.
• It’s only salesperson 8 who has hit the current period’s top orders..
• The previous period was more successful for salesperson 1 and salesperson7.

Why are Graphs and Charts used to Visualize Data?

We had to include this sub-topic because sometimes, you need to go back to the basics to understand why you do things.

So why do we use charts for data visualization?

Data on its own cannot inspire imagination. And this is because we’re naturally not gifted in crunching numbers as machines do. We need data visualization because a visual summary of information makes it easier to identify patterns and trends than looking through thousands of rows on a spreadsheet.

In today’s world, marketing is one of the many data-driven fields. Besides, tons of data generated daily from various attributions, such as social media, pay-per-click ads, SEO, and video marketing, is immense.

In the next section, we’ll discuss leveraging stories to communicate video data insights for yourself or to your clients in a compelling way. You don’t want to miss it. Keep reading.

How To Interpret Graphs And Charts For Video Analytics Data?

Choosing the relevant visualization is crucial to creating a compelling data story that inspires action. We’ve rounded up some charts that are tested and proven to visualize video data.

Why? These charts put more emphasis on clarity and simplicity. There are 3 charts, namely:

• Sentiment Trend Charts

How to interpret graphs and charts? The Sentiment Trend Chart is a combination of both line and bar graphs. The plotted line curve helps the audience to note the differences in performance across time (financial year).

The chart incorporates color coding to help the audience distinguish performance. Green stands for desired performance or positive feedback on video, while red stands for unwanted performance dislikes. September remained worst month as many dislikes came on this month while May remained best in getting likes.

• Area Stacked Chart

This chart uses color-coding to create variation in the performance of the variables under study. For instance, the critical metrics under review are namely shares, likes, and dislikes.

• Stacked Bar Charts

A stacked Bar Chart is made up of composite bars. So each color in a bar represents a variable that adds up to a sub-total, as shown below.

Now that you’ve learned about video data, how to represent it, explore it visually, tell a story, and design for an audience: the obvious next step is to put it into practice.

So, grab your data and visualize.

What tools can you use to visualize your data?

How to interpret graphs and charts? There are lots of tools at your disposal. The best for you depends on your data and what you want to do with it. But most likely, it can be some combination of the ones in the coming section.

Some are good for quick looks at your data, whereas others are better for wider audiences. Let’s check them out.

What Are The Best Tools For Visualizing Easy-To-Interpret Charts?

You must be thinking how you can create such charts which are shown before. Can you believe these charts were drawn in Google Sheets. Yes, its true but problem is these beautiful charts are not natively available in Google Sheets. You need to find some solution to have these charts in this tool.

What’s the Solution?

The solution is not to do away with your Google Sheets but rather to enhance it with an third party Add-on.

Remember, you need visual diagrams that communicate insights effortlessly for you to create a compelling data story.

There’s a simple and easy-to-use data visualization tool you can use to create clear and compelling video data stories. This app makes charts that you can customize and download EASILY.

This easy-to-use and affordable Add-on is called ChartExpo.

What is ChartExpo?

ChartExpo is a highly affordable and easy-to-use Google Sheets and Excel Add-on that creates simple and easy-to-read visualizations for your video data stories.

So if you’re looking for a data visualization tool to create easy-to-interpret charts that seamlessly complements your report, check no further.

So how does ChartExpo help you to create persuasive data narratives?

• ChartExpo is Loaded with Over 80 different Chart Templates

This budget-friendly data visualization tool comes jam-packed with over 80 other chart templates just for YOU to select the BEST chart for your story.

And this includes, Stacked bar, Area Stacked Bar, and Sentiment Analysis charts.

• Unlimited Freedom to Highlight Key Takeaways

Besides, with ChartExpo, you have unlimited freedom to alter your charts to align with your video data stories. So you don’t have to sweat over highlighting the key insights that support the main idea.

Other Benefits

• ChartExpo add-on for Google Sheets comes with a free 7-day trial.
• Essentially, if you’re not satisfied with the tool within a week, you can opt-out as quickly as signing up for a trial.
• The cost of accessing 80-plus chart templates is ONLY $10 a month after the trial period.
• You have a 100% guarantee that your computer or Google Sheets won’t be slowed down because this Add-on is light.
• You can export your easy-to-read and intuitive charts in JPEG and PNG, the world’s most-used formats for sharing images.

How do You Install ChartExpo Add-on in Google Sheets?

To Get Started with install the ChartExpo for Google Sheets Add-on from the link and then follow the Simple and Easy Steps Below.

• Open your Google Sheets desktop application.
• Open the worksheet and click on the ‘Add-ons’ menu.
• You’ll see the ‘ChartExpo’ option in the dropdown menu.
• Click on ‘ChartExpo’ and then open it to see your Add-on.

• After that you will see ChartExpo section on the right side section of the screen.

Click on “Create New Chart” to see the available charts groups.

• You’ll see an extensive library of visual charts categorized into 6 different groups.
• Click on any of the 6 different chart groups and select the chart you want.
• You can now access your chart templates. For instance, both Stacked and Area Stacked Charts are located under the General Analysis section.
• On the other hand, a Sentiment Analysis Chart is found under the Sentimental Analysis section.

Let’s check out how you can tell stories using the charts below to enhance your understanding.

Sentiment Analysis Chart

Imagine you’re running a video storytelling campaign to create awareness on behalf of a SaaS start-up. You want to gauge the performance of the video assets using the engagement level (likes and dislikes) in a year

Note: the likes and dislikes data can easily be collected from YouTube.

Let’s use the data below to represent our scenario.

Months	Likes	Dislikes
Jan	1605	433
Feb	1342	229
Mar	740	259
Apr	653	127
May	1933	114
Jun	947	117
Jul	1687	84
Aug	792	99
Sep	1527	1038
Oct	1678	272
Nov	1121	333
Dec	1555	304

Let’s power up ChartExpo Add-on for Google Sheets to visualize the video data above using Sentiment Analysis Chart, as shown below.

• Add-ons > ChartExpo > Open, as shown above.
• Then proceed to the Sentiment Analysis Charts tab.
• Click the tab to access Sentiment Analysis Charts.
• Select the Sheet Name.
• Add new metrics, which in our case are Likes and dislikes
• Add a new dimension, which in our case is months of the year
• Click on Create Chart, as shown below.

Check out our chart below.

Let’s tell a story using this chart.

• September is the worst month of the video campaign. The dislike sentiments are more pronounced, although the likes are high.

• The best months are May, July, October, and December.
• Only 8 out of 12 months are above the trend line.

• So overall sentiment trend is remained upward.

Stacked Bar Chart

How to interpret graphs and charts? Let’s create a simple video data story using Stacked Bar Chart. Imagine a musician and have many videos on YouTube playing musical instruments, such as goblets, drums, violin, keyboard, flute, and guitar.

How would you keep track of the performance of each Video? You guessed right, use a Stacked Bar Chart.

Let’s use the table below as sample data for our scenario.

Videos	Views	Watch Time	Likes	Dislikes	Share
Guitar Video	6569	487	3640	1764	580
Flute Video	8230	495	3613	1885	736
Keyboard Video	3530	457	3071	1829	874
Violin Video	5138	577	3337	541	3081
Goblet Drum Video	7192	495	3405	1526	946
Drum Video	8500	584	3984	1568	557

Let’s check out our resulting visualization.

So what are the insights?

• Violin video is more engaging and has a wider reach than the remaining 5 videos due to a high number of shares.

• There are videos with less which, which is a sign that audience might not have liked it much to click on it and view it.

• Violin video is engaging because it has fewer dislikes than the other 5 video assets.

You still haven’t install the ChartExpo yet? Click on link below to install in your favorite tool.

Wrap Up:

How to interpret graphs and charts demands understanding and translating data into meaningful insights. Besides, how to interpret charts boils down to two things, namely:

• Basic analytical skills
• Nature of the visualization

When you’re creating a data story for your audiences, you should use visual charts that are easy to interpret. Why? This makes your story credible and more appealing and if you have right chart visualization library like ChartExpo then it can add incredible value to your presentation.