Good work.

Radar plots lose their effectiveness when the values are close to the center, and they suffer from orientation effects the same way as pie charts do. A good alternative is a parallel coordinate chart:
http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/ParallelCoord.html

And while we all “know” that pies are good for showing portions of a whole, they are not really all that good for that purpose, especially if there are too many slices. I prefer a column or bar chart with sorted data.

Because it requires scrolling to see the entire visualization I didn’t notice at first that the heights of the two columns are an appropriate visualization that supports your conclusion.

Your visualization is reminiscent of Tufte’s “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.

@ Jon – bubble charts would be a good topic for another post because they seem to be coming increasingly popular.

I’m almost in complete agreement. I would classify line/XY chart types with markers and lines as not junk. I would classify a bubble chart as 50% junk.

The situation changes when you look at the chart types that are not useful for displaying information but are useful for constructing a worthy display which is otherwise not attainable. For examplle, while stacked columns and bars are not as useful for displaying information as they seem, hiding selected series in the stack produces useful floating charts. These are good for Gantt charts, for example, or charts that track high and low values (e.g., daily temperatures, blood pressure). Or for customizing a candlestick chaart or making a box plot.

Re: 2007 vs. 2003. Jorge only showed the built-in standard chart types, whicch are essentially unchanged in 2007. He did not show the “built-in custom” types (great oxymoron, eh?) available in 2003 and earlier but dropped from 2007. This the junk content of 2007’s standard charts matches 2003’s. If you consider the junk content of the bult-in custom types, I’ll bet 2003’s raating drops to 7 or 8 percent.