Archive Articles & Posts from The Excel Charts Blog

Better Charts for Business: When Business Doesn’t Care

Most managers don’t care about a better visualization of business data. As a reader puts it: Short of locking management in a room with Tufte and Few, how do I sell management on the value of seeing things differently? Instead of trying to sell, let’s see why the aren’t buying. Here are some reasons. Good … Read more

Inconsequential Foreplay

Nathan discusses this chart. He says: I know a lot of you don’t like bubbles in your viz, but this one works for me. Jon Peltier, in the comments, argues that: Sets of bars would have been more effective. Tim adds the definitive argument: “Always using bar charts is like always using missionary position. It … Read more

Excel Charts: If It Isn’t Broken…

I humbly accept our business visualization reality: 90% of all business charts are created in Excel and most business users are unwilling to learn yet another application and go through all sorts of hassles (data management, compatibility issues, file sharing) just because a different product offers a bigger chart gallery and some obscure defaults no … Read more

Here's How the Unemployment Rate Sounds Like

Do you want to know how the unemployment rate sounds like? Copy this string: 65536,32768,16384,16384,16384,4096, 4096,2048,1024,1024,256,128,64,16,4,2 and paste it into here (right-click, past). Now the Dow Jones Index: 2,4,4,2,2,32,32,16,64,1024,2048,4096, 16384,65536,32768,16384 All together now: 65538,32772,16388,16386,16386, 4128,4128,2064,1088,1024,2304, 4224,16448,65552,32772,16386 This is fun. (Big gloomy smile.)

God and Moses? The Differences Between Edward Tufte and Stephen Few

I have a confession to make: my past is paved with chart-making sins, including some capital ones (yes, 3D pie charts, too). But years ago I saw the light in Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and since then I’ve been avoiding eye-candy temptations. Now I do my best to pursuit the path … Read more

Sub-Prime Charts: Should Data Visualization Be Boring?

In a recent article for the New York Times, Paul Krugman, the 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, writes: “The banking industry that emerged from that collapse [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][the Great Depression] … Read more

How a Bad Excel Dashboard Made me a More Skilled Excel User

Some years ago, as part of my (then) new job, I had to maintain a monthly updated Excel dashboard. It was a maintenance hell, I hated it, but I couldn’t change it because of my poor Excel skills. “This is stupid, there must be a better way”, I kept saying to myself. So, I searched, … Read more

Irregular Time Series? No. Oversampling.

If you are a market researcher, and you want to make sure that you get more reliable results for a subgroup in a survey, what do you do? You must increase the overall sample size (and spend a lot of money), right? Actually, you don’t. You can oversample that group only, and then weight it … Read more

Focus + Context (a Bar Chart Is Not a Skyscraper)

Textures. 3D. Pie charts. Primary colors. Trends hidden behind labels. Backgrounds. Pie charts again. Clear signs of a bad chart, right? Right. It is so easy to spot a badly designed chart that you can use a computer to do it. Don’t waste your time. Let’s stop discussing the obviously wrong and start discussing the … Read more

Will Traditional Charts Survive?

No, traditional charts are useless in our complex world

playfair-piechart Over the next 25 years, we will need new visualization tools to replace traditional charts.

As you know, line, bar and even pie charts first appeared 200 years ago, with William Playfair, and perhaps until 25 years ago, they were good enough helping us to make sense of our data. Before computers, they were crafted by graphic designers. Kids in schools drew them using millimetric paper.

Lotus 123 and Harvard Graphics were the most popular charting tools in the early days of personal computers. With those tools (and later, with Excel), the charting landscape changed forever. Some charts vanished, either because they weren’t simple enough and/or didn’t make it into the chart gallery (I miss trilinear plots – yes, Jon, I know how to create them in Excel, but still…), while others should never have been allowed into that gallery.