A lot of people have asked me, is data visualization important? Let’s start with a picture.


The above picture is a common phenomenon of data links. If you’re a chef, the most important part is cooking and setting the table, which is data analysis and data visualization.

For example, many people now pay more attention to the presentation of food than to the taste of food. If the presentation is not good, they will not even eat it. When it comes to data analysis, it doesn’t matter if your data analysis is good and multi-dimensional, but you’re presented with the following dense charts.


Data visualization covers a lot of content, and automated monitoring kanban is a common one. Agile BI is also a hot word in the past one or two years, which means that it is not necessary to do daily, monthly and weekly reports every day, but to develop once and automatically form push.

In this way, data analysts can not only be freed from the stage of taking numbers, but also think more about data-driven business development, and enable business personnel (such as marketing, finance, product and operation) to conduct self-analysis and improve efficiency.


How to do data visualization?

With all these tools, which one is better to start with? That’s what a lot of people struggle with.

As you all know, there are several common ways to do data visualization:

1, Excel

Don’t think of EXCEL as just tables. You can use it as a database, as an IDE, or even as a data visualization tool. If Excel can master VBA with ease, can play all kinds of flowers, no matter with the help of the chart plug-in foreign aid can also kill a lot of white players in a second.

It can create professional pivottables and basic statistics charts, but the default Settings of colors, lines, and styles make it difficult to create “elegant” visuals. There are only bar charts, bubble charts, heat charts and regional maps, etc. At present, common requirements in the field of big data are not within the optional range, and the available themes are also Microsoft classic ones, which appear to be some “visual fatigue”.

2, Echarts


Will program, Echarts dozens of lines of code, minutes show people dazzling. Free and open source, native Chinese, compared with other open source libraries, the documentation is more detailed.

But there are many disadvantages. First, like Python and R, you need to be able to program. Second:

  • Many parts of the document are not well written or detailed enough
  • There are still a lot of bugs
  • Compatibility with IE8 and IE8 (even IE9) and below is very poor and often reports a lot of errors

These things require programming and can only be used by IT or professional data analysts, and I’ve heard that they are tired of constantly changing requirements and want to have a data analysis tool that business people (ordinary people) can pick up in a minute, which would take a lot of work off their hands. Of course, business personnel also think so, such as their analysis every day good also let a person quite afflictive….

When it comes to self-help analysis, Tableau and FineBI come to mind. One of them has the largest market share in China, and the other is a foreign giant. However, I heard that Tableau has no domestic community and can’t find a solution if there is a problem. FineBI is still more appropriate.

3. FineBI (free download address at the end of the article)

This is a visual self-service BI tool, the whole operation is derivative data/even database – – processing data (visualization ETL) – select charts – drag data fields – visual display & beautification, easy to operate and quick.


In most cases, this tool is used to make visual reports, connect with enterprise big data platform, and do enterprise data operation analysis.

  • You can think of it as a visualization tool because it comes with dozens of commonly used charts and dynamic effects.
  • You can also use it as a report tool, because it can access a variety of OA, ERP, CRM and other system data, do not write code do not write SQL can do reports.
  • You can also think of FineBI as a data analysis tool, with built-in common data analysis models and charts for exploratory analysis.

    • Visual cockpit




    Built-in rich charts (just the tip of the iceberg)

    Self-service analysis

    Does this direct drag feel good compared to code?

    With the report system, does the enterprise still have to go up BI?

    Many people think that a report is BI. In fact, reports are only part of BI, and while the results of BI applications are often presented through reports, BI is definitely more than just reports.

    Reports can only implement queries, and queries can only tell you what the facts are, right? No matter how dazzle query interface, how simple, how convenient. And we need to know not just what happened, but why it happened, and that requires analysis. There are two elements to implement analysis, one is arbitrary dimension; The other is arbitrary analysis path.

    BI value Thinking

    BI doesn’t make you believe what you know, it forces you to ask more questions and questions. BI forces us to doubt our conclusions, go back to the beginning, and reset our assumptions and conditions. It makes us think, not give facts.

    You need BI tools to help you make the best decision, not the right one. BI takes decisions beyond the end result.