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Effective Charts and Dashboards for Excel users

Archive for the ‘Chart Types’ Category

The best of two worlds: the scatterplot pie

The best of two worlds: the scatterplot pie

The best chart is always task-dependent, but let me assume that you would choose the scatterplot as the best chart and the pie as the worst. They are like water and oil: impossible to mix them! Are they? Let me tell you about a little experiment. I

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The Unbearable Lightness of Pie Charts [Data Visualization for Excel Users]

The Unbearable Lightness of Pie Charts [Data Visualization for Excel Users]

Well, a data visualization book cannot avoid pie charts, so here it is, a page about pie charts for my tutorial Data Visualization for Excel Users. Enjoy and comment, please…  

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Making maps in Excel: cross-stitching edition

Making maps in Excel: cross-stitching edition

There are several objects in Excel you can make a map with. If you want to use shapes, you can follow my my tutorial. You can also use a scatter plot. The map above uses cells and conditional formatting. So, here is how to do it (this example used

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The same data, the same map, different stories

The same data, the same map, different stories

Choropleth maps are the pie charts of cartography. Both can show us a simple pattern, but that’s a very low starting point. And both have severe perceptual issues. One of the issues with maps is how to define classes. Gregor published last Friday an interesting post and I wanted

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The health benefits of line charts

The health benefits of line charts

I recently bought a pedometer to make sure I walk at least those recommended 10,000 steps a day. As you can see, there is a strong variation, and no meaningful pattern is emerging. Now that I’m blogging about it, I’m sure that will happen soon . It’s

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Irregular Time Series? No. Oversampling.

If you are a market researcher, and you want to make sure that you get more reliable results for a subgroup in a survey, what do you do? You must increase the overall sample size (and spend a lot of money), right? Actually, you don’t. You can

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Focus + Context (a Bar Chart Is Not a Skyscraper)

Textures. 3D. Pie charts. Primary colors. Trends hidden behind labels. Backgrounds. Pie charts again. Clear signs of a bad chart, right? Right. It is so easy to spot a badly designed chart that you can use a computer to do it. Don’t waste your time. Let’s stop

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Pie Charts – A Devil’s Advocate Point of View

In what seems to be a post-vacation syndrome, I am in the mood for pie charts. I see them everywhere, even in car logos. Actually, I am more in the mood to defy current “crowd wisdom” about pie chats. Search the web for “pie chart” and you’ll

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The Best Pie Charts Come From Germany

Best Pie Chart Award (clean and balanced. Your perception may not be great at comparing angles, but who cares?)   2th Place (also nice, but too many slices, and I don’t like the title around the pie)   Lateral Pie-Thinking Award (well, perhaps someone just messed up

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Charting around the clock

I’m a consensus kind of guy, I can’t help it. I always try to find the best parts of not-so-good things (a Curate’s egg syndrome?). Let me give you an example. One of the reasons why people like pie charts is because of its strong and familiar

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