How to Use a Table

Having been introduced in Presenting Data in Tables to how tables can be used to display data, in this post we'll look at what sorts of decisions we need to make when putting together a table.

The following material is taken from the OpenLearn Unit More working with charts, graphs and tables, in particular Section 3.1: What is a Table:

In the next post, you can have a go at designing your own tables... :-)

Presenting Data in Tables

Although this uncourse blog experiment is about visualising data in a graphical way, it's probably a good idea first of all to look at how data is presented in numerical, tabular form.

Read the following section taken from the OpenLearn unit Working with charts, graphs and tables, in particular Section 4.1: Reading Data From Tables:

In the next post, we'll look at how such tables tend to be put together.

Building on OpenLearn

I'm lazy...

...so I'm going to try to reuse as much OpenLearn content as possible for this uncourse blog...

Here's some of the raw material:

You might of course ask why bother writing this stuff out from scratch, yet again, for a new course if it already exists? Which is why I'm going to try not to...

About Visual Gadgets

A month or two ago, I started exploring the use of a blog as a medium for drafting the materials of a possible online, access level undergraduate course on interactive media and computer game design: Digital Worlds: Interactive Media and Game Design uncourse blog experiment.

That experiment is ongoing, but now I also have to draft some materials for a 'chunk' of another course... here was the tease I drafted to give an overview of what I saw the chunk covering...

In this block, you will explore how pictures can tell stories. From simple bar charts and line graphs, to 2.5D animations for displaying data, from visual thinking tools to geotemporal mashups, you'll explore how visualisation techniques can be used to make sense of things as diverse as large socio-economic data sets and complicated ideas.

As I've got in to some sort of a routine with the Digital Worlds blog, and also accreted some useful comments through it and additional material around it, I thought I'd draft some of my visualisation material in public too...

To hopefully make the material useful in the year or two before it makes it into a published course(!?), I'm going to sketch out my ideas in the context of the Google Visualization API gadgets - hence the name of the blog.

So here goes...