In what seems to be a post-vacation syndrome, I am in the mood for pie charts. I see them everywhere, even in car logos. Actually, I am more in the mood to defy current “crowd wisdom” about pie chats. Search the web for “pie chart” and you’ll get more than one million results, and a … Read more
Best Pie Chart Award (clean and balanced. Your perception may not be great at comparing angles, but who cares?) 2th Place (also nice, but too many slices, and I don’t like the title around the pie) Lateral Pie-Thinking Award (well, perhaps someone just messed up the template) Designer’s Pie Charts Award (data? … Read more
And so the first year went by. I’d like to thank everyone that reads and contributes to the blog. I learned a lot with you last year (and I hopefully I gave something back). Now, let’s see what the future brings.
I just downloaded Google Chrome, played a little and I must say I like it. It is very clean, so it goes well with my idea of information visualization. If I were a IE user I would probably make the switch, but for serious browsing you can’t beat Firefox+extensions. If a portable version is made … Read more
Do you type well? I mean, do your thoughts flow naturally through your fingers or, on the contrary, your (low) typing skills come between your thoughts and your writing? I don’t type fast enough, I look at the keyboard from time to time and I don’t follow some simple typing rules that would save me … Read more
I’ll be here for the next 15 days. Great beach, air temperature and water temperature around 25ºC (77ºF), perfect for everyone that hates hot weather and cold water (that would be me). Best of all, I’ll be able to use my mobile internet connection…
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
One of the reasons why information visualization in business is so poor is because many managers are clueless about it. They really believe that a simple training course on Office tools is more than enough to create some nice 3D charts for a Powerpoint presentation (and they are right: that’s all they need, because that’s … Read more
You know how useful graphs can be to to find trends and patterns in the data. But you can also use them to detect some mistakes, something that is much more difficult to do with a table. Let me give you a real world example. Is there anything unusual in this time series, anything that … Read more
You can learn Excel and spend more time with the kids, but Ian comments that: I have found that I have ended up doing many things that other should have done – even if it took them longer. Being great at Excel slows promotion through management ranks – delegate and show what a manager you … Read more