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Data Visualization Courses

Take free online data visualization courses to build your skills and advance your career. Learn data visualization and other in-demand subjects with courses from top universities and institutions around the world on edX.

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What is Data Visualization?

Data visualization is the graphic representation of a data analysis to achieve clear and effective communication of results and insights. Complex ideas are presented in charts and graphs with the goal of quickly and easily disseminating key, actionable information. Data visualization is an essential part of data science and analytics, especially when working with large, complicated data sets. The visualization tells a story, whether as a stand-along graph or combined with other graphs, charts and design elements in an infographic or dashboard.

Online Courses in Data Visualization

Learning data visualization techniques is important for jobs in business analytics, data analysis, data science, statistics and much more. Any time you are tasked with communicating information from data, whether it’s to an audience of coworkers, clients or customers, you will need to know how to most effectively present your findings. Start by learning how to use some of the key data visualization software and programming languages such as Microsoft Excel and Python. The free online Excel course, Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Excel, will teach you key analysis skills as well as how to combine data in mashups, create various types of visualizations and share them to the Microsoft Power BI cloud service. Learn how to quickly explore different visualizations to determine which one are the most effective for your audience. Microsoft also offers courses in using Power BI and SQL Server reporting to build and share visualizations of your data. Python is a very powerful open source programming language for creating data visualizations. Enroll in one of the free online Python courses that focuses on using the language in data science applications.

Jobs in Data Visualization and Analysis

Data visualization and skills are required for many jobs in the data analysis and statistics professions. Whether you’re applying for a position in data science, business analytics or a related field, having expertise in visualization will be beneficial to your CV. Data visualization specialists are in high demand by companies working with big data analytics, machine learning and other areas that involve processing extremely large and complex data sets. Applicants should have experience with multiple data visualization tools and platforms, be both highly creative and analytical and have hands-on experience working with Java, Python, SQL and other languages.

Explore a Career in Data Visualization and Analysis

If you like using both the analytical and creative sides of your brain and you love math, computer science, data analysis and statistics, then a career as a data visualization consultant or engineer may be right for you. Explore data visualization, data science and programming courses on edX to get started on your journey into this exciting field. Most courses are self-paced so you can enroll and start learning today.