Impressive

Vizualizations

Considerable

Effort

But you can often do something useful with ease

Impressive visualizations can be extremely valuable, worth the considerable effort made to create them.
But don't get hung up on the complex, you can often build useful visualizations with surprisingly little effort.

For a personal project I experimented with using sparklines to provide historic context to a value.
Without any prior knowledge it took me a couple of hours to get from a google search to a useful display (using jquery sparklines).
Only after building the sparkline did I realize that some other data displays weren't needed