ABSTRACT
The images on the monitor aren’t drastically different from the pictograph tables first made in Mesopotamia—amazing when people consider those were made over five thousand years ago. The monitor shows numbers and words neatly stored in uniformly sized boxes. The way one's eyes scan from top to bottom before landing on the name of one's destination city feels automatic, on account. Sometimes the right tool for the job comes in the simplest form, like in tables. And unlike charts that visualize thousands of data points, tables almost always show actual numbers. This gives educators more to reason with. Researchers use tables to organize their findings in their papers and journal articles. Websites that publish school-related data use them to organize demographic and school performance data. Tables empower one to compare information by scanning left to right and top to bottom.
