How Your Brain Sees Data: Bars, Lines, and Pie Charts
Whenever I’m designing a dashboard, I ask myself the question: could someone spot the insight before they start reading? When…
Written Visual Analytics Tutorials
More than a blog. Still forever free.
What are we waiting for?
3 Totals Hacks to Transform Your Tableau Bar Charts
I’ve recently had a fantastic run of totals-based discoveries. I’ll admit – I’ve overlooked the humble Totals feature. At the…
Data vs. Analytics vs. Visual Analytics
As tradition holds, Playfair Data shares our analytics trends and predictions going into each new year and recaps it by…
Year in Review / Top Playfair+ Tutorials of 2025
What a year 2025 has been! With 29 new written tutorials, 18 new video tutorials, and many public and private…
How Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics Apply to Visual Analytics
Understanding human perception, cognition, and psychology is indispensable when it comes to creating successful visual analytics tools. A psychological element…
Definitive Guide: Tableau vs. Power BI vs. Oracle Analytics Cloud
Okay, I get it. Searching for “Tableau vs. Power BI” leads to over 25 million results in Google, and that…
3 Tips for Feature Engineering
Feature Engineering is a critical part of any machine learning project. It is the step of the project where subject…
3 Ways to Create Data Connections in Oracle Analytics Cloud
Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) offers a robust set of data connections you can use as an engineer. These range from…
3 Ways to Make Stunning Scatter Plots in Oracle Analytics Cloud
The scatter plot is a chart type that has many uses in visual analytics. They’re used to visualize relationships between…
How to Make a Biggest Movers Chart in Power BI
Biggest movers charts in Power BI are powerful charts that show the performance of dimension members with the largest absolute…
3 Ways to Make Beautiful Bar Charts in Oracle Analytics Cloud
When it comes to comparing discrete categorical values, rarely is there a better choice than the bar chart. Invented by…
How to Insert Custom Images in Power BI Matrix Visuals
Matrix visuals are extremely popular and easy-to-use charts in Power BI. Their familiarity to spreadsheets makes them easy to adopt,…