You can learn a lot from an expert, but a game changer challenges your believes and assumptions and, at some point, that’s exactly what you need to move forward. Creative destruction. I love it. Let me tell you about three of my personal Excel game changers. Jon Peltier Well, I don’t have to tell you … Read more
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
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
Excel 2007 is useless. This was a shocking revelation when I tried to create the charts for last post (Chart Design: Abortion Ratios 1980-2003). It was my first serious attempt at using Excel 2007. I failed miserably and gave up. I had to do everything in Excel 2003 and then open the file in Excel … Read more
I love to spend time playing with my three-years old twins, and I wholeheartedly want to create for them the memories of a happy childhood. This is something that I can’t delegate, and if I don’t have the time, I’ll have to find it. They will not wait to grow up. Stupid time wasting at … Read more
I just added a poll to the sidebar on the right (RSS readers might need to visit the site to see it). I’d like to know if you use recorded macros or write VBA in Excel. I ran an informal poll among friends and colleagues with catastrophic results and I’d like to compare results. Please … Read more
Jon Peltier’s site is usually my first stop when I want to find a solution for an Excel chart problem. His site is one of the best resources for add-ins, tips, tricks and “impossible charts”. Now he’s sharing his expertise with us in his new blog. So if you want to go beyond basic Excel … 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