Showing the distance or showing off the distance

Imagine that I'm a relatively known runner, and my blog on lifestyle and running receives thousands of visits everyday. Now, I want to post how many kilometers I've run or how many calories I've burnt this month. I could export my running data from, say, Runkeeper, which downloads an Excel file, and paste it into my blog, like this:

_____________________________ 2015-08-29 | 4.19 km | 22:19 min

2015-08-20 | 2.65 km | 16:47 min

2015-08-11 | 2.23 km | 14:47 min

2015-08-08 | 2.66 km | 15:19 min

2015-08-05 | 3.02 km | 19:43 min ______________________________

Now, that was really difficult for me to paste into the blog post. I had to remove other data, give it a nice alignment, put that lines there, make bold the kilometers. Really, it costed me a lot. Before doing it I thought it would just be ugly, not difficult. By importing the Excel file into Qlik Sense and creating a chart, you could present your data like this:

Or like this:

Which, by the way, are interactive. Try scrolling while your mouse pointer is on the pie chart. Or leave your mouse pointer on one of the bars. If you're watching it in a mobile device, use two fingers and move them clockwise in order to get the pie chart to rotate.

The difference between showing data and showing data beautifully

Think for example that you'd like to show the US top populated cities on your blog, for whatever reason, and differentiate between cities with + 1 million habitants and - 1 million habitants. How would you do it?

This is a way of doing it: you put it into Excel coloring the cells and embed the image on your blog post:post: 

 

But that’s ugly, and radically impractical. How long did it take you to get from the top of the image to reading this sentence? You’re older now, and you’ve wasted your time scrolling.

With Qlik Sense, you could represent the same data this way:

Or this way:

Elegant, practical, definitely beautiful!

I'll soon post the course's url here, so stay tuned!