The art of successful presentation of data is not a difficult subject to learn. However, many people ignore the potential benefits they may get provided little time, effort and some useful tools. What can be done to increase the efficiency of data?

Once I was searching the web trying to find new useful, interesting or just fun sites. Among others, I came across an interesting web site. I will not give its address to avoid hidden promotion. I can only say that the most of the contents of the web site consisted of a variety of statistics about everything in the world. The smallest birds, the most successful TV-shows , the most expensive vehicles, , the top search terms and so on and so forth The information presented appeared to be rather structured. It was divided into separate categories such as Birds, Internet, Hollywood, etc where all the facts were presented in the form of so-called TOP 10. But I was completely lost in the abundance of information. The reason was easy to understand. There was nothing to draw my attention. I was depressed by nothing but the words. And I went away from this web site leaving really interesting information.

Some time later I began to ponder on the role visualization plays in our perception of the site.

It is well known that most of the information we get comes to our mind with images. The speed of visual data adoption is much higher than in the case of a simple text. Regardless the uniqueness of the content, simple list of numbers without the relevant images support often causes irritation and the desire to escape from the distressing element. At the same time even simple small table or chart can change the situation completely. So, how this can be used to make people come, stay and most importantly return to your web site?

For example, consider the web sites of many banks, investment and financial companies. During the continuing crisis they are forced to fight for each existing or potential client. So why not, to represent the essential data of numerous economic and financial indices, interest rates and values as a line chart or a histogram? They will show the whole image to customers and provide the opportunity for a better analysis of the data.

The main goal of data visualization is to communicate information, but more efficiently, clearly and obviously than the simple words do. Today we have many tools to display data on the site. The best way to enter data to the content of the web site attractively and in eye-catching way is to use flash components. Most of them do not require installation, work with many scripting languages and run on most of the browsers and support dynamic update of data in XML format. The variety of colors, types of diagram and interactivity make them very good tool for creating scalable and completely adjustable charts and animated graphs.

Today we are able to find plenty of flash chart and graph components to visualizate data. We can mention some of them.