This page hosts the material that supports Chapter 1 but does not belong in the print book: the works the chapter cites in Appendix C, the Priya example referenced in the opening scene, and the documentation pointers from Appendix D.
Cited works
- Cleveland, W. S., & McGill, R. (1985). Graphical perception and graphical methods for analyzing scientific data. Science, 229(4716), 828–833. The paper underwriting the chapter's ranking of position, length, area, and color as encodings of quantitative information. The result has been replicated many times since; the original is freely available through most university libraries.
- Munzner, T. (2014). Visualization Analysis and Design. CRC Press. The closest the field has to a canonical academic textbook. The chapter cites Munzner's framing that visualization is appropriate when the work calls for augmenting human capability rather than replacing it. The author's companion resources page hosts lecture slides, exercises, and references that complement the book.
- Parasuraman, R., & Manzey, D. H. (2010). Complacency and bias in human use of automation. Human Factors, 52(3), 381–410. The source for the chapter's complacency-bias claim. The paper is the canonical citation for under-monitoring of automated systems when they appear to be working well.
The Priya dashboard, expanded
The chapter walks four small failures in the Q3 sales dashboard Priya did not author: the auto-scaled y-axis that turned 4% growth into the visual signature of 40%, the alphabetical region ordering that hid the underperformer, the product table that omitted margin, and the headline number without comparison. The book describes them in prose; this page hosts higher-resolution renderings of each failure mode and its corrected version, side by side.
Renderings to come as part of the next companion-content pass. The book deliberately keeps these out of print to remain tool-agnostic; the renderings here use the current Power BI Copilot surface and will refresh as the surface changes.
Documentation pointers (Appendix D)
- Microsoft Power BI documentation hub — the canonical Power BI reference, refreshed weekly. Cited in Appendix D Section 2.
- PL-300: Power BI Data Analyst Associate — the certification path for analysts using Power BI as their primary tool. Cited in Appendix D Section 3.
- DP-600: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate — the certification path for analysts using Microsoft Fabric. Cited in Appendix D Section 3.
About these pages
Each chapter has a companion page on this site. The book is the source of the discipline; these pages are the source of whatever the book cannot keep current in print. Updates to a chapter's companion are logged on the errata page with date and a one-line note.