I am a moderately advanced Excel user. This means “a dangerous person” for the IT department, but I like this daily fight, and Excel dashboards are among my preferred weapons. Let’s see how they can be used. Excel is the best tool for executive dashboard prototyping, because of its flexibility and development costs. Creating a fully … Read more
Annotating your chart helps your audience to understand the reasons behind some patterns or outliers. But, please, please, don’t bury the data under boxes and arrows and busy grid lines, like this one on the right does (from WTRG Economics). How can you improve a chart like this? First of all, the series must be … Read more
We are so busy creating sexy charts to illustrate some random data that we often forget to check if our chart really answers the question. Heck, most of the times we don’t even have one. Chart first, ask questions later. One of the major differences between tables and charts is this: a tables says “here … Read more
Can a picture of a nude person improve your decision-making processes? (Please don’t say “yeaaaaah”.) Probably not, but if you need a good attention grabber a picture of a naked b0dy is your best bet. Make sure you’ll add one to your next sales report. Because, if you are using those glossy 3D pie charts … Read more
According to Stephen Few, the founders of Tableau Software made some assumptions about visual analytics’ adoption that we can summarize in a single sentence: analysts want to find hidden insights in large and complex data sets using new visual paradigms. Later on, they discovered that these assumptions were somewhat flawed, and that what people really … Read more
Many misconceptions plague the field on information visualization. This post lists some of them and tells you how to remove those misconceptions.
You can add silly 3D effects to a pie chart, you can explode all the slices, you can compare multiple pie charts, you can use a legend instead of labeling the slices directly. This will probably render your graph useless, and make you look kind of dumb, but it is not the end of the … Read more
I really dislike stacked bar charts… Let’s see a new bad example. Steve Rubel shares with us how he spent his time online (update: page no longer available) over the last two weeks. He uses the Firefox add-on PageAddict to monitor the time. He writes: As you can see almost all of my time online … Read more
This article goes much against conventional wisdom about pie charts (and doughnut charts) by answering these two simple questions: Can we use a large number of categories in pie charts? (Yes, we can.) Can we make a productive use of the apparently useless doughnut chart? (Yes, we can.) Disclaimer (Sort of…) Let me start by … Read more
Loss aversion – wrong chart example JunkCharts writes an interesting post on how loss aversion can happen in chart-making. The general concept of loss aversion tells us that “people strongly prefer avoiding losses than acquiring gains”. Translated to chart-making, it means that there is a “tendency to avoid losing data at any cost”. “To clarify, … Read more