Few of us are mathematicians or statisticians, but often we must make some sense of numerical data, be it sales figures, studies, or surveys. An article published in The American Statistician' bears good news for those who have been paralyzed by math anxiety when confronted with confusing and apparently meaningless numbers. The good news is that it is not our fault. A.S.C. Ehrenberg, a professor at London Business School, writes that most data are poorly presented, and the cure for our anxiety lies with the producers of the data. Anything that abets these processes, then, will make numerical tables easier to read and analyze, Ehrenberg says.
Averages provide a common base for comparing each individual reading.
Order the rows or columns of the table by the averages or by some other measure of size. We find it difficult to sort out an unordered array of numbers. It is too demanding to recall which numbers were high and which low. Keep the order constant if there are other similar tables. It is easier to read figures down than across a page, because we are used to doing arithmetic that way.