Data exploration

It’s a good idea to use data exploration techniques on your data early on to help you identify interesting patterns for storytelling.

Tools for data exploration

Using simple tools to explore your data is much less cumbersome than working directly in D3.

Here are some tools you can use:

• Excel
• Google Sheets
• Tableau
• Power BI
• Raw Graphs
• Google Charts
• Python and R, if you are familiar with code

Note that the charts you produce with these tools usually cannot be used “as is” in data products. We need to recreate them using D3 to ensure usability and accessibility.

Work with your data

You may have an idea of the chart or graph you’d like to use. While exploring your data, if you realize it isn't well suited to that type of data, don’t force the wrong data visualization technique.

Continue exploring until you find the right data visualization technique. Let the data determine what technique will work best for the tasks at hand.

Explore visualization possibilities

Here are some tips to help you explore your data:

• consult the data visualization section for options, depending on the story you’d like to tell
• start with simple techniques, and progress to more complex ones
• figure out what works to help people understand the data, not what “looks cool”
• keep your mind open and try techniques you are less familiar with
  
  

Additional resources

• 15 Data Exploration techniques to go from Data to Insights