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Data Visualisation Fundamentals for Absolute Beginners

Learn the theory behind data visualisation and get hands-on experience in creating meaningful visualisations for your business.

Duration

2 weeks

Weekly study

5 hours

Included in an ExpertTrack

Course 3 of 4

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Data visualisations are ongoing proof that a picture is worth a thousand words. Learning to effectively turn data insights into visual language is a highly sought-after skill, as businesses around the world struggle to turn their data into useful, digestible insights.

This course starts from scratch to teach you how to turn your data into a story that’s understood across your organisation. You will learn how to use the elements of visual design - line, shape, negative space, volume, value, colour and texture - and turn them into meaningful imagery that you can use to communicate with stakeholders, customers, and colleagues.

Improve your visual literacy

Rather than starting at chart types and ideas, you’ll build your understanding of visual literacy so that you can understand our instinctive responses to images and how to properly channel them into useful stories.

Learn to conduct visual analysis

Once you understand the basics of visual literacy, you’ll be able to analyse illustrations and data visualisations. This can help you improve your own visualisations and parse great visualisations you see to find ideas and inspiration.

Discover how to create data visualisations for your business

Finally, you’ll move onto creating data visualisations for your business. By now, you’ll understand what makes an effective visualisation and how to combine insights and design elements into presentations that make a real impact.

Week 1
Welcome to the Course
- About this Course
  This activity introduces you to the course outline and the learning outcomes, as well as information on navigating the course on the FutureLearn platform and your CloudSwyft Hands-on Labs.
- Visualisations are Everywhere
  In this activity, you'll be introduced to the concept of Visualisations
- Visualisation Fundamentals
  We're going to look at the fundamentals behind data visualisations. We'll explore data, basic statistics and the elements you'll use in your first charts.
- Visuals for Comparing and Relating
  It's easy to think about different ways to compare or relate different bits of data. In this section, we're going to see how we can use visuals to compare and relate data
- Visuals for Interacting and Analysing Data
  We'll be looking at using interactive visualisations to not only compare and relate data but to begin doing data analysis with visual artifacts.
- Wrapping Up the Week
  Congratulations, you've reached the end of Week 1. This week we learned about the basics of visualisations and how we can use visuals to compare, relate and analyse data.
Week 2
Business Visualisations and Visualisations of Tomorrow
- Business Visualisations
  In this activity, we'll introduce and describe the four main business visualisation artifacts, namely, analysis, reporting, scorecarding, and dashboarding
- Business Context for Visualisations
  Visualisations need context to turn data into useful information and decisions that can be used to impact your company positively. In this activity, we'll focus on the business context for your visuals.
- Advanced Visualisations
  We'll be looking at advanced visualisations, what they are and their applications. We'll learn about butterfly charts, stream charts, Marimekko charts, Sankey diagrams, candle-stick charts and more and their applications
- The Future of Visualisation
  In this activity, we'll go through the expectations for visualisations in the future.
- Wrapping Up the Course
  This is the closing activity for Week 2, where you reflect on what you have learned during the week and then close out the course.