In my visualization post, What Makes a Good Data Visualization I mentioned two aspects of data to consider. You want a graph that conveys ideas from the data that are too complex to explain ...

Data visualization has progressed from a means of making things tractable and comprehensible on the page to an automated hunt for clusters and connections, with trained machines that do the searching.

Finally, rather than visualizing your data as columns, you can display a bubble map or, as shown in the example below, a heat map, which provides a more regional overview than a granular picture.

Network graphs, now growing in popularity, are designed to help us see connections, capturing the interplay between many dimensions. These graphs can depict people, locations or objects; the ...