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Effective Charts and Dashboards for Excel users

Data Visualization Blog

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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Your glossy chart is more than that: it’s how you see the World.

Your glossy chart is more than that: it’s how you see the World.

The French call it l’air du temps, the spirit of the times. You breathe it, you wear it, you eat it. You can’t escape it. Over the last 20 years, the spirit of our times gave us things like: Glossy Pie Chart   McMansion BMW X6 Jeremy

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Highest Mountains, Deepest Trenches, and a Doughnut

Highest Mountains, Deepest Trenches, and a Doughnut

A while ago something broke inside me. My deepest held beliefs were shattered. I started drinking again. Absinthe. I love absinthe. 69% ABV. It started when I saw it. A glorious pie chart displaying growth rates. Growth! At first, I couldn’t believe it. I took off my glasses. Yes,

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Too Many Tools, Too Much Grammar, Too Little Sense

If you want to improve your data visualization skills you should think of it as a foreign language, where you use data points instead of words, charts instead of sentences, dashboards instead of paragraphs, axis and labels instead of punctuation marks. It has its own grammar, created

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Don’t Make me Think (About Your Charts)!

I’d love to make my broken English more Tufte-compliant. I’d love to make the design of ExcelCharts.com more Tufte-compliant. I’d love to make my home office, my lifestyle, my… you’ve got the point. It should be easy: here is a framework I am comfortable with, now I

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Creating More Effective Graphs [Book Review]

If you are a graphic designer you already know too much about beauty and aesthetics. If you want to play with data it’s time to grow up and learn some real graphs. I mean it. And I have the ideal book you: Creating More Effective Graphs, by

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Data Visualization Hierarchy of Needs

Data Visualization Hierarchy of Needs

Is it possible to create a “data visualization hierarchy of needs” like Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs? I’ve tried that in the pyramid above. Here are the details: Is it the right Medium? A chart can really help processing data and minimize information overload, but what about

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Excel Dashboards: Who Needs Them, Anyway?

You are not happy at work. I can clearly see that. Morale is low due to the economy, but it’s something else, isn’t it? You feel handcuffed. You keep hitting a wall. It hurts, hitting a wall while handcuffed… You work with data. There is a formal

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Anatomy of a Bad Chart

We often learn a lot more from bad examples than from the good ones. So, here is a really bad one (you can find many examples like this in corporate annual reports…). So, what’s wrong here? What do they want to say? If you don’t know what

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Consistent dashboard design: write a simple sentence

You know that you should avoid the Crystal Xcelsius dashboard style, but now what? Where do you place your charts, kpi, tables? Here is a trick that you can use: write a sentence or a paragraph that summarizes the core message. For example “Our sales are growing

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