John McFarlane works for his family company, which has sold traditional clothing from four shops in the East of Scotland since 1886. He wants to compare the performance of each shop and has collected some detailed information for the past year. Now, he wants a convenient format to present this to the company
Board of Directors. John’s problem is that he has a huge amount of data. The following table shows the number of units of five products sold each month in each of the shops. John has this kind of information for several hundred products, along with costs, profit, margins, advertising expenditure – and many other figures.
Question: How could John McFarlane use graphs to present information to the company Board of Directors?
Plot different possible sets of graphs, interpret them one by one, and provide your analysis for each graph and the story it tells.
Also, explain the whole big picture that John can illustrate to the Board of Directors through interpreting all the graphs.
