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
I am sure Albert Einstein was thinking of Excel dashboards when he said “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”. Let me tell you why. Demographic Dashboard: The VBA edition I published some time ago a first version of my Demographic Dashboard to show how an average Excel user could design … Read more
Some metaphors are really stupid. Convincing people that running a company is like driving a car and you need a similar dashboard is one of them. If you are naive enough to buy it, most dashboard vendors will happily fill up your precious screen real estate with irrelevant gauges and and speedometers designed to look … Read more
I’ll be adding some classic videos here, and Hans Rosling must of course be one of the first to be included. He is using visualization software that later was bought by Google. I am using it to display old vs young dependencies.
Bonavista Systems announced today an Excel Dashboard Competition. Participants stand a chance to win an iPhone, a workshop hosted by Stephen Few and a copy of Few’s “Information Dashboard Design”. Unlike other competitions, there is no data set. You just have to use Excel and MicroCharts, their sparkline generator. You don’t need to buy MicroCharts … 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
Do you need VBA to create an Excel dashboard? Our recent discussion clearly shows two lines of thought: a) you should use it because there are things you just can’t do without VBA and if you have access to a powerful tool you should put it to work; b) you should avoid VBA like the … 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