My own visualization practice
I like to call it the invisible data visualization: all those Excel charts made for private consumption by product managers, accountants, marketeers, sales reps. You can’t see them but they are there, and millions of hours are spent every single year making and presenting them. Then we have the highly visible data visualization: the sexy kingdom … Read more
Are you sure you can recognize an Excel chart from miles away? I thought that too. Then I started playing with some data visualization historical milestones and now I’m not so sure. Trying to recreate these charts in Excel is a great way to improve your Excel skills and pay a humble tribute to the data … Read more
Well, here is my first chart in Tableau, finally! After publishing my experiments with population pyramids (using Excel), I thought I could try Tableau Public with the same dataset from the US Census Bureau. Here is the result. I never really played before with Tableau Public and it took my less than an hour to … Read more
These are the population pyramids (and half-pyramids…) of some more or less randomly selected countries. Each series displays population by age group (both sexes) in a given year, from 1981 (darker color) to 2050 (lighter color). The charts share the same scales (5-year age groups from 0 to 100+ in the y axis, and 0% … Read more
There are so many bad charts published every single day that redesigning some of them would be a full time job. Many are involuntarily funny. And there are some dangerous and stupid ones. I live in Portugal, a small country that only gets international press coverage when something goes wrong. Like now. Public debt is … Read more
You are in the middle of a presentation and your worst nightmare suddenly comes true: your boss yawns, and for the right reasons too: your presentation is dull, your charts are dull dull dull and you are boring your audience to tears. The solution? High impact charts that keep your audience glued to the screen. … Read more
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Here is a good example of give-a-fish versus teach-to-fish: if you search for “excel dashboard” you’ll get at the top of the search results my own Excel dashboard tutorial and … Read more
Why are the true benefits of information visualization so hard to prove?
Here are two ways to display a relatively large dataset, montly unemployment rates by state since 1976. The first one, above, is perfect to see the overall patterns, the range from the lowest to the highest, the outliers and the slopes. An interactive version would allow the user to highlight specific series. A small-multiple version … Read more
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