This is an outline of Edward Tufte's pioneering work on the use of graphics to display quantitative information. It mainly consists of text and ideas taken from his three books on the subject along with some additional material of my own. This page is in text only format: in order to understand the concepts you need to read the books because the concepts cannot really be grasped without the illustrations, and current video monitor technology is too low in resolution to do them justice. His work has been described as "a visual Strunk and White" (here is a German translation of this article).

Throughout this outline I have included references to the illustrations in his books that are labeled with the abbreviations VD-pp, VE-pp, and EI-pp, where "pp" is a page number and:

* VD is "the Visual Display of Quantitative Information"
* VE is "Visual Explanations"
* EI is "Envisioning Information"

Clift's Notes on Edward Tufte.