If you google for “Excel dashboards”, 6 out of the first 10 results link to Charley Kyd’s ExcelUser website or some of his affiliates. MrExcel calls Charley Kyd “the king of Excel dashboards”. There is a good reason for that. Three years ago, Charley Kyd published an e-book, Dashboard Reporting with Excel, probably one of … Read more
Excel is a great (but underrated) BI tool. Several BI vendors gave up fighting it and offer Excel add-ins as front-ends for their BI solutions. So, if you want to create a dashboard you should consider Excel, since it really offers better functionalities than many other applications for a fraction of the cost and development … Read more
Do you prefer the full report: Or the executive summary? For Tufte’s fans, Minard’s map plays a central role in Tufte’s iconography, and the way he praises it (“best statistical graphic ever”) is quoted endlessly (974 results in Google as of today, to be precise). Tufte discussed The Map in his first book (The … Read more
I know, I know, no one likes pie charts, but I can’t ignore them. A pie chart compares proportions but it is of limited use: either the data is too complex and a pie chart can’t handle it, or it is too simple and you should just use a table. So, the first tip should … Read more
Funny story… I was playing with domain names today, trying to register names for future projects like “exceldashboards.com”. Unfortunately, this is already taken. And who owns it? Business Objects, the makers of Crystal Xcelsius (remember my Xcelsius dashboard series?). Type exceldashboards.com (I refuse to add a link) and you’ll be redirected to the xcelsius home … Read more
This is the second of 10 posts where I’m listing tips for better charts. Please take a look at the first post where the project is discussed. These are my chart formatting tips: Use the right chart type for the data and the problem; Apply sound design principles; Use color strategically: mute axis and grid … Read more
This is the first in a series of 10 posts where I’ll suggest a (hopefully) coherent set of tips to improve our charts and, more important, to improve the way we make sense of the data. These are the planned posts: General charting; Formating; Column/Bar charts; Line charts; Scatterplots (XY charts); Pie charts; Other chart … Read more
Nathan, over the FlowingData blog, points to this video where John Tukey himself discusses the analysis of multivariate data using computers… in 1972. The library contains other great videos, so I encourage you to explore it. Tukey had an enormous impact in the way we look at the data, but exactly who are “we”? Are … Read more