Displaying change over time
I’m a consensus kind of guy, I can’t help it. I always try to find the best parts of not-so-good things (a Curate’s egg syndrome?). Let me give you an example. One of the reasons why people like pie charts is because of its strong and familiar metaphor – it is part of our daily … Read more
Source: U.S. Census Bureau (original Excel file). The abortion ratio is defined by the number of abortions per 1,000 abortions and live births. (Click to enlarge) Notes: 1. We know that information visualization is all about pattern detection. But often our design choices hide relevant patterns behind the obvious one(s). Take this panel, for instance. … Read more
Following the 10 x 10 post series on tips for better charts, these are the 10 tips for line charts: Don’t use line markers unless you really need them to identify b&w printed charts; Don’t use a legend; directly label the series, instead; If you can’t easily see the pattern of each series you may … Read more
Can Crystal Xcelsius replace Excel as a charting tool? As the regular readers know, I am creating an Xcelsius version of my Excel Demographic Dashboard to answer this simple question. I am afraid the results until now are less than stellar. Although I could easily add four gauges with the four main demographic KPI, I … Read more
You struggle every single day to design the best, the most eye-catching chart for the next presentation. If your goal is to impress your boss, you can stop reading, I have nothing new to offer, I can’t even impress mine. But if you really want to understand your data, there is some (hopefully) interesting stuff … Read more
Well, I must say I am a bit disappointed with the September issue of Stephen Few’s Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter. It discusses an important but much neglected topic, visualizing change through animation. Few’s paper was written for SAS Institute, and uses JMP, a statistical analysis product from them. From the screenshots, I wouldn’t say I … Read more