[jszymborski]

The example they show of a Great Table is, to my taste, way too busy. Here is my unsolicited opinion:

The top and bottom horizontal rules on the Title appear to be superfluous, and I dislike how it is aligned with the first column (row labels) rather than the second. I feel like a little space to breath at the bottom, along with a bold font would add visual hierarchy w/o the clutter.

The row label backgrounds are far too dark and the font weight makes it hard to read. I'd prefer a very light blue here instead. I don't like the row group label ("Name") being italicized.

The spanner labels floating in the centre make the table hard to scan. Would be much nicer aligned left.

Finally, I really dislike the font (maybe this is just my browser, though).

I mocked-up some of the changes here, I think this is a much easier to read table:

https://i.imgur.com/iMMf5vo.png

[mikehollinger]

You might want to read Edward Tufte's Beautiful Evidence.[1] He discusses stuff like what you brought up about readability and distracting from the message / point of the data.

If you've seen sparklines, [2] Tufte coined the term.

Whenever I do a UI review I end up paging through it just to see if there's something we're not thinking about, and its an interesting book to just open to a random page and read.

Plus he has an entire treatise on why PowerPoint is terrible.

[1] https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_be

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline

[jszymborski]

I'm a big fan of Tufte and he certainly informs a lot of my opinions on making tables and figures :)

[airstrike]

> Plus he has an entire treatise on why PowerPoint is terrible.

As someone trying to build a PowerPoint competitor, this is awesome. I'm going to start here and work my way through his whole corpus

[esafak]

See also https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/

[itronitron]

According to everyone that has ever told me how to do powerpoint presentations, they need an intro slide that tells the audience what they are about to be told in the presentation they are about to be told, and a conclusion slide that tells the audience what they were told in the presentation they were told.

[TheCleric]

I don't think that's just powerpoint though. This is a common public speaking method: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/08/15/tell-em/

[mikehollinger]

> According to everyone that has ever told me how to do powerpoint presentations, they need an intro slide that tells the audience what they are about to be told in the presentation they are about to be told, and a conclusion slide that tells the audience what they were told in the presentation they were told.

Sorta? I guess that might be like driving. Hands on the wheel, gas on the right, etc. But what about driving in the rain (presenting to a cold prospect)? What about driving uphill (addressing a conflict)? What about driving offroad (explaining to an irate customer what happened?

There's storytelling and communication in each of those, but they're different.

See here[1]. It does have an outline, and it does have takeaways, but there's a a structure to the story in the presentation.

It opens with "3 parts" but immediately grabs your attention with item 0. I do that because I'm presenting to engineering students, and there's some CS/ECE folks in the audience and we count from zero. Plus its fun to shake people out of "here we go, another presentation" mode.

Each part has some interesting stories and plot points. The first explains moore's law, and advances in ML / DL. You can't tell from the charts, but there's a narrative that says 2011 to 2016, we saw this advance. There's a relentless march of technology. Isn't that interesting. Part two talks through real projects, and real outcomes, and the shift in value and complexity of delivery at scale vs "we got it working on a laptop." Part three looks at the future - and calls back to pt 1, and proposes a question - what rate do you think stuff'll advance? Here's my guess. Here's some resources. Keep the convo going. Thank you. etc.

It's an incredibly fun presentation to give, and people enjoy it as well. This doesn't have the basic structure you shared, but -- it kind of does. We come back to the "agenda" pages when transitioning between the 3 sections. It has a clear punch line. And it contextualizes what we're going to talk about.

It does this, though, without having a boatload of bullet points and outlines, and, looking at it with fresh eyes, probably makes no sense without a talk track, but people seem to like it and find it useful.

[1] https://ibm.box.com/v/ou-ai-session-2024

[inopinatus]

Table titles should be either centered above, or captioned below. Left-aligning them above any column instantly conveys a generally false/unintended impression of the title being a top level in the information hierarchy of the table. In the modernist makeover above I was immediately uneasy that the title stipulated “names, addresses, characteristics” whilst apparently aligned to exclude the names.

In contrast the census manual chooses to center almost all labels within their box, and when not it is almost always due to indentation, and moreover is unafraid to set column widths to fit the data not the labels, with indent and hyphenation to match. The result is both horizontally compact and intuitively comprehensible.

edit: on further reflection I also think it’s a crappy title. Titles and captions should convey context, scope, purpose - and may otherwise be omitted entirely for the editorial sin of failing to justify their own existence. As given, this one could be retitled “Table 1” with no loss of information or generality. For an article that’s trying to discuss and reformulate tabular presentation from first principles, that’s a tad disappointing. Since table titles form a crucial layer of their information catalogue, it is hardly surprising that the census manual devotes an entire chapter to the matter of title construction, and even though somewhat domain specific and archaically worded it is well worth the visit

[pimlottc]

I don’t understand why there aren’t any horizontal rules or stripes etc to reinforce the idea that each row is its own record.

[itronitron]

Yours is an improvement, the example from the article suffers from uniform weighting of all characters and numbers in the table.

[hooloovoo_zoo]

Keep going IMO: shorten the title to remote correspondents since the rest is redundant with the column names. The blue highlight is now redundant with the title so ditch all of it. Personal characteristics vs location don’t meaningfully improve the organization so ditch those as well.

[zem]

the white text on a dark background really was a glaring misfeature in the original example, to the extent that i wonder if the colours looked different on the author's monitor

[sixQuarks]

I totally agree with you. You should start a new library called Even Greater Tables.