Remove as many grids as you can, and those you keep, make them light, not heavy. Grids look ugly, visually dominate and give readers' eyes a black border to leap as they scan the table. You don’t box in your words in sentences, so don’t box in your numbers in tables.
Make compact: in the after, readers’ eyes travel less to take it all in. Everything is in a common eye line.
Remove distracting typography: in the after, gone is all that blue…such frippery might attract us to the table, but it then distracts us from the content. Also, in the after there’s no underlining nor any reversed font (that’s the white-on-blue column headings) – both hinder readability.
We now more easily spot pointless numbers – the ‘Disagree’ ones. They’re "100 minus the ‘Agree’ ones". Even the graph's authors realise the ‘Disagree’ numbers add nothing, for they omitted the 2017 ‘Disagree’ ones from their graph.
Figure 3 also follows more tips for good tables:
Put the most important column next to the labels – the ‘Total’ column. I wish UK newspapers would do this with football league tables – the most important column is ‘points to date’, and it’s on the far right, far away from the team names… to see how teams are doing, readers’ eyes must flick back and forth from far right to far left.
Put other columns in some order other than alphabetical. Here, they're in ascending order of the 'Agree' numbers (which - unsurprisingly - is descending order of the 'Disagree' numbers... I told you those numbers are redundant). Avoid alphabetical, for it leaves big and small numbers mixed up, competing equally for readers’ attention.
Now the surprise. Look back at the original bad graph. Yes, it’s bad, but as a table, it’s got some neat bits. The ‘Overall’ column is next to the labels. Tick. The other columns aren't in alphabetical order, but in descending order of ‘Disagree’ – 61%, 33%, 31%, 15%. Another tick. From the jaws of defeat, the graph finds some success.
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