Chart types
How do you sell your outrageously expensive consulting services? Simple, just add a chart… Not every chart will do, of course. Let me outline some basic design rules of what I call a “consulting chart”: It shouldn’t be recognizable as a standard chart that you could create in Excel; It shouldn’t use popular eye-catching design … Read more
I’d like to answer or comment on search queries that bring readers to my blog. Here are some of them involving pie charts: What is the usefulness of pie chart in research? Research found that many pie charts resemble Pac-man. Pie charts of the american revolution They go very well with the Powerpoint version of … Read more
In my Demographic Dashboard I have a scatter plot that shows the trend towards an aging society. Today I wanted to test the new Google Chart API and the Motion Chart with the same data set. The chart displays the old dependency ratio against young dependency ratio. It clearly shows the shift from high ratios … Read more
This is the time for scatter plots in the 10 x 10 charting tips series: A scatter plot is square by definition (I forget that sometimes…); In some cases, it makes more sense to use a scatter plot than two column charts: for example, instead of having a column chart to display product market share … 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
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
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
This is an Excel scatterplot. Each point is one of the 4200 Portuguese civil parishes. The green point shows the active parish and the red ones some parishes that may have a similar profile. Of course, if you select a different parish the red set also changes. I like this idea of displaying geographic coordinates … Read more
We all know how found of pie charts Tufte is: A table is nearly always better than a dumb pie chart; the only worse design than a pie chart is several of them, for then the viewer is asked to compare quantities located in spatial disarray both within and between charts (…). Given their low … Read more