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Effective Charts and Dashboards for Excel users

Archive for the ‘Chart Types’ Category

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 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 population

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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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Chart redesign: California majority party by county

Nathan asks us Can You Improve this Mediocre Statistical Graphic? Since there are only two series (two parties) with a obvious mirror effect, I would say it doesn’t make sense (from a chart economy point of view) to display both series. And since the 50% mark is

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Uncommon knowledge about pie charts

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

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