I am writing Charts for three months now, and I’d like to share with you some stats, some thoughts, some expectations and plans for 2008. First things first: thank you. Thanks for reading and commenting, thanks for linking, thanks for buying the dashboard. Thanks for sharing your time. So, basic stats: 30 posts, 150 daily … 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
Dear Mr. Hervé Carré I’ve been browsing through some of the Eurostat publications and I thought you would appreciate some constructive feedback, since it is your job to ensure that governments, businesses, media and the general public do have access in a timely manner to reliable and objective data. I’m starting with some general findings, … Read more
I tried to create a Crystal XCelsius version of my Demographic Dashboard and failed miserably. But what about a new spreadsheet version? That should work, right? Wrong. I downloaded StarOffice 8 and just linked the pivot table (“datapilot”) to the Access population database via ODBC and waited… and waited… and waited… and finally was able … Read more
This is the last post in a series where I examined the possibility of creating a Crystal Xcelsius dashboard using my Demographic Dashboard as a benchmark. I’ll discuss here my overall conclusions. I must say from the start that I am very disappointed. Let’s start by the data set and Xcelsius integration with Excel. I … Read more
Can Crystal Xcelsius replace Excel as a charting tool? As the regular readers know, I am creating an Xcelsius version of my Excel Demographic Dashboard to answer this simple question. I am afraid the results until now are less than stellar. Although I could easily add four gauges with the four main demographic KPI, I … Read more
Stephen Few shares with us his capstone presentation that he delivered at InfoVis 2007. If you follow his newsletter or his blog (you should) there is nothing really new but, if you don’t, this is a good summary of his views regarding information visualization. I’d like to comment a few points. Knowing how to use … Read more
The relevance principle means that every variation should carry a meaning, derived from data variation, not from design variation. If it doesn’t, it can be confusing or misleading. Suppose chart A displays population density by country. “Vary colors by point” is an option in Excel, but why should you use it? This is a design … Read more
For many of us this is a provocative question. Haven’t Tufte, Few, Cleveland and many others proved that, beyond reasonable doubt? Isn’t there a prosperous industry based on the obvious usefulness of charts and information visualization? Is everyone wrong? Let me play devil’s advocate here. A large majority of charts you’ll find in the corporate … Read more