A picture is worth a thousand words

Suppose you are stuck in finding a particular place. So you ask a person on how to reach that particular destination (say, ABC Ltd). He says take a first right from here where you see the hospital and then an immediate left followed by a right again till dead-end followed by a right and a left Obviously this sounds bit confusing. You then go to another person asking for help. He writes something on a piece of paper and gives it to you to follow it. The paper has the following picture:

By seeing the picture and following according to it you are able to quickly spot the place you wanted to. Now there is no requirement to explain the difference. A picture helps in addressing your requirement of information in a much better manner than mere word. But what is the relevance of this in Statistics? How does the above story make sense in studying Statistics? Look at the two data: Data-1 and Data-2 given below: Data-1

Data-2

When you observe carefully, what is that you infer? Yes. Your guess is right. Both represent same data. But data shown in Data-2 is more appealing and at one glance, you get a big picture of the data. Yes. At first glance, you could easily make out that the number of companies are making profits of Rs. 35 Crores is maximum i.e., 90 Companies Of course, you get the same information from data-1. But the difference that figure in Data-2 make here is the appealing nature and providing access for quick decision. Thus Diagrams present huge mass of quantitative data in a condensed form attractively. Diagrams and graphs are some form of pictures. They are visual aids of presenting the data in pictures, geometric figures and curves. Graphical representation of data is very easy to understand compared to the verbal representation of data. It makes very easier for the learner to understand the concept. Any data before they are analysed by statistical methods have to be arranged and displayed in a manner that is informative and attractive. Thus, diagrammatic or graphical presentation of data adds a pictorial effect to what would otherwise be just a mass of figures. A major advantage of these representations is that they have more appeal especially to a layman as they communicate information visually. For this reason graphs are often used in newspapers, magazines and businesses around the world. As features of data become visible at a glance in a graph, one can study easily the fluctuation of data and hence know the correlation between two or more sets of data, which in turn helps in forecasting. Pictorial representation is used extensively in everyday life and in business.