Free Guides on Presenting Statistical Data by Gene Shackman

Date: Friday, March 13, 2026

Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.

I’m Gene Shackman, Applied Sociologist and author of the Beginners Guide to Evaluation.

One critical part of conducting evaluations is presenting the results, which are often presented in table and chart form. If you’re new to reporting, or if you’d like to brush up on current trends, there are many websites with useful advice. I’ll describe a few of them.

• Statistical organizations, like the Royal Statistical Society, have websites with advice, like their Best Practices for Data Visualisation. Their guide includes section on Principles and Elements of Visualisations, and Styling for Accessibility. Statistics Canada also has a Best Practices page, with a description of different types of charts, and the elements of the chart.
• Tableau also has several useful pages. Their What Is Data Visualization? page has a section “More specific examples” that links to guides on bar charts and pie charts. Tableau also has a Guidebook that shows various kinds of charts and some tips on how to present them well. Tableau also has a page with some guides on Best Practices for Designing Accessible Views.

So many other organizations have guides on presenting data. I’ll just list a few of them, in reverse chronological order, the most recent ones first.

• The Urban Institute has a Data Visualization Style Guide. Chapters include Chart Parts, Best Practices for Data Visualization, and Accessibility. This guide is intended for Urban Institute employees so their publications are all uniform, but they made it public too.
• George Washington University librarians adapted a guide from a UC San Diego library guide that mostly links to resources about data visualization.
• Johns Hopkins Sheridan Library has a guide with a short section, Designing Effective Data Visualizations, which introduces “preattentive attributes. Preattentive attributes are visual attributes, including size, color, shape, and position that are processed at a high speed by the visual system.” 
• The American Statistical Association has four articles in their journal Significance, on Presenting Data the Significant Way. Part Two describes the Principles and elements of visualizations (although I don’t agree with all of them).  Part Three is mostly about accessibility
• The UK’s Civil Service has many pages, that can be found in a search of their website. A few examples are Data Visualization: Charts, and Accessible charts: a checklist of the basics.
• Hehman and Xie, two psychology faculty, wrote a detailed discussion of charts and graphs, and their components, when to use them and things to watch out for. Their paper includes many illustrations to show their points.

Hot Tip

I curate a website that contains free resources for social research methods. The resources above, and more, are located on the presenting statistical data page.

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