As I was reading the CPA Australia 2024 Annual Report I was interested in the presentation of charts (graphs). A lot of money had been spent on the presentation of the report. There were lots of high-quality photos and other images. I was disappointed with much of the data visualisation.
As a simple example, below is a recreation (as close I could get) of the Total Revenue chart from the bottom of page 118.
You can check out the annual report at the link below.
https://www.cpaaustralia.com.au/integrated-report/downloads
I did the CPA Australia Data Interpretation and Visualisation micro course a couple of years back and one thing that was stressed was making the chart easy to read.
The years and values in the above chart are not easy to read.
There is a level of accuracy in the numbers displayed that isn’t required. Instead of rounding to thousands they should be rounded to millions.
The vertical axis seems redundant given that every column has a value.
The changes below didn’t take much effort, but I think the chart below is easier to read and gets the job done.
The charts are the same size.
The problem with using a bar chart is that the timeline is vertical, which is unconventional. Maybe unconventional enough to cause confusion.
The year labels need not be rotated, and alternating year labels could be hidden. Rounding to millions would also help.
Thanks for reading and your comments Jon.
My main aim was to show that bar charts handle vertical labels better than column charts. Also the rounding to millions makes more sense. This was a high quality annual report and some of the charts didn’t match that quality.