When you cook, you go through certain steps in a consistent order. You figure out which ingredients you need, you gather them, you prep them, and finally you cook them and present your finished dish.

Creating a data visualization is a lot like cooking. You decide what data you need, you collect it, you prepare and clean it for use, and then you make the visualization and present your finished result.

When you’re cooking, it helps to understand what each ingredient does so you know what you can do with it. For example, salt and sugar look similar but achieve very different results!

In this section, we’ll talk about what the basic ingredient groups of data are and what can and can’t be done with them so you have a sense of how to properly work with them later on.