Jorge Camoes So our usually calm data visualization corner on Twitter was shaken by this tweet: Forget pepperoni – mushroom is Britain's most liked pizza topping (65%), followed by onion (62%) and then ham (61%) https://t.co/5kYikXOEtF pic.twitter.com/AJezMfJHbk — YouGov (@YouGov) March 6, 2017 quickly followed by this one: We're very sorry for the confusion, but this is … Read more
This post on how to make Excel dashboards was one of the first I published here, and it still is one of the most popular posts. But I actually prefer broader data visualization discussions than Excel tips & tricks. Excel dashboards, although something that interests me, was never a priority. Until now. I just launched an ebook on Effective … Read more
I have a soft spot for bad and seemingly hopeless charts and graphs. All they deserve a second chance, so I try to help them out of the gutter. The other day, I was roaming the dirty alleys of El Dorado Hills (don’t ask) when I saw it. The speedometer. Few charts are strong enough to endure … Read more
You are a brilliant scientist and you just made an amazing discovery. You want to announce it to the world. So you prepare a few slides and decide to use that cute font, Comic Sans. After the presentation you realize that, although people praise you for your discovery, a very vocal minority mocks you for … Read more
Dear Stephen Few I’m writing this assuming that my book Data at Work was one of the targets of your post “Data Visualization Lite”. If that is the case, thank you for spending some of your time reading the book. When I started my humble blog, never in my wildest dreams I though that would … Read more
(All the Excel charts in my book are available for download, but I promised to write tutorials for a few of them. This is the first one.) Name: Bullet charts What it is used for: to display key performance indicators. Use them to replace speedometers if you want a more compact visual that can be stacked to … Read more
It surprised me. And it shouldn’t. You see, there is nothing wrong in using data for the sole purpose of creating aesthetically pleasing visual objects. On the other hand, if you want to make sense of the data, and communicate your findings, it’s easy to argue that effectiveness should be your primary goal. This is the general model. … Read more
A long time ago I tweeted about the need for everyone in the data visualization community to write a book. I wasn’t joking: if you only tweet or write a few posts, you can’t possibly comprehend the lay of your own data visualization land, how deep the rabbit hole goes, the ________________ (choose your own … Read more
Stephen Few and Alberto Cairo (Alberto is the host, that’s why he doesn’t say much) And now let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: –Behold! human beings living in a meeting room, which has a projector with a Powerpoint presentation always turned on; here they have been from … Read more
If you are an Excel user, are you aware of how flexible it is? Do you really take advantage of this flexibility when making charts? You can simply enter a few values and some (almost) random cells and visualize them. You can add empty rows or use dummy variables. When it comes to formatting, you … Read more