A picture is worth a thousand words – especially when you are trying to understand and gain insights from data. It is particularly relevant when you are trying to find relationships among thousands or even millions of variables and determine their relative importance. Organizations of all types and sizes generate data each minute, hour and day. Everyone – including executives, departmental decision makers, call center workers and employees on production lines – hopes to learn things from collected data that can help them make better decisions, take smarter actions and operate more efficiently. Regardless of how much data you have, one of the best ways to discern important relationships is through advanced analysis and high-performance data visualization. If sophisticated analyses can be performed quickly, even immediately, and results presented in ways that showcase patterns and allow querying and exploration, people across all levels in your organization can make faster, more effective decisions. To create meaningful visuals of your data, there are some basics you should consider. Data size and column composition play an important role when selecting graphs to represent your data. This paper discusses some of the basic issues concerning data visualization and provides suggestions for addressing those issues. In addition, big data brings a unique set of challenges for creating visualizations. This paper covers some of those challenges and potential solutions as well. If you are working with massive amounts of data, one challenge is how to display results of data exploration and analysis in a way that is not overwhelming. You may need a new way to look at the data – one that collapses and condenses the results in an intuitive fashion but still displays graphs and charts that decision makers are accustomed to seeing. And, in today’s on-the-go society, you may also need to make the results available quickly via mobile devices, and provide users with the ability to easily explore data on their own in real time. SAS Visual Analytics is a new business intelligence solution that uses intelligent autocharting to help business analysts and nontechnical users visualize data. It creates the best possible visual based on the data that is selected. The visualizations make it easy to see patterns and trends and identify opportunities for further analysis. The heart and soul of SAS Visual Analytics is the SAS LASR Analytic Server, which can execute and accelerate analytic computations in-memory with unprecedented performance. The combination of high-performance analytics and an easy-to-use data exploration interface enables different types of users to create and interact with graphs so they can understand and derive value from their data faster than ever. This creates an unprecedented ability to solve difficult problems, improve business performance and mitigate risk – rapidly and confidently. Data Visualization Techniques – From Basics to Big Data with SAS Visual Analytics