Visuals for Allied

Read the overview below and complete the activities that follow.

You work for Allied Distribution, a food service distributor that offers wholesale prices to a variety of customers, including restaurants, hotels, schools, and hospitals. You recently conducted a survey of your major clients and are now selecting visuals for your report. In this activity, you will look specifically at one data set, determine the best visual, and decide on a number and title for the visual.

CONCEPT REVIEW:

Analyzing this case requires an understanding of the various types of text and data-generated visuals available to communicators, including the following:

-Tables

-Bar charts

-Line charts

-Pie charts

You should also have an understanding of how to number and title visuals.

Read the case below and answer the questions that follow.

You work for Allied Distribution, a food service distributor that offers wholesale prices to a variety of customers, including restaurants, hotels, schools, hospitals, and other types of businesses that offer food service to their employees. You recently conducted a survey of your major clients in Wisconsin and are now selecting visuals for your report.

In planning your visuals, you have decided to include a visual that shows the distribution of the types of companies the respondents in your survey represent. Your purpose in using a visual to present this data is to show your reader what types of companies are represented in the survey and to give the reader an immediate understanding of how much any one type of company is represented. The distribution is as follows: restaurants, 35 percent; hotels, 22 percent; schools, 17 percent; hospitals, 13 percent; businesses/manufacturing firms, 8 percent; other, 5 percent.

This visual will be the fourth one in your report. Two of the previous visuals are tables, and the third is a bar chart. The visual that follows the one you create for the above data will be a map showing where your clients are located throughout Wisconsin.

Answer the questions to defend your choice of the format your visual will take and to explain how you will number and title the visual.

Make sure you respond to the following questions after reading the case above.

1. What visual will help you best present this data? Why?

2. What are your options for numbering this visual?

3. What will you name this visual? Why did you choose this title?