I’ll assume that you are not paid for your artistic skills. You’re a mere mortal in a corporate environment, trying to make sense of your data and making rational decisions if possible. You make charts all the time, but you don’t really know if this new “data visualization”
Read more →I spent the last two weekends among kings and witches, foxes and wolves, dumb men and devious women, visiting castles in Scotland and villages in Africa. Two weekends of great storytelling. One little thing bothered me, though. Explicitly or not, many stories ended with the words “and
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Data visualization is becoming a catch-all concept with little analytic usefulness. The infographic plague we have to endure is not helping. It doesn’t have to be that way. Stephen Few wrote recently about the distinction between data visualization (“the goal that data be visualized in a way
Read more →From: CMO To: All Staff Re: Changes in internal data analysis and reporting Consistent with current efforts to streamline our operations, management team has decided to change the way the company analyses and communicates business data. Recent assessments made clear that we are using just a small fraction of
Read more →Let’s assume that a bad chart is a chart that breaks basic perceptual laws, contains too much fluff, do not respect data relationships and do not clearly answer the underlying question (if you can find one). Why do people make such charts? Below you can find some
Read more →(…) On the top of the mountain was a plain. There stood an old stone house, and in front of the house lay a great fish-pond, but behind it was a dark forest. He saw neither men nor animals, everything was quiet; only the wind rustled among the trees, and
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Here is an interesting technique: using two y-axis to display the same data at different resolutions. Yellow (BMI) and blue (Weight) lines should overlap (there is a one-to-one correspondence between BMI and Weight for a given height), but they don’t because they are using a higher resolution
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Are you sure you can recognize an Excel chart from miles away? I thought that too. Then I started playing with some data visualization historical milestones and now I’m not so sure. Trying to recreate these charts in Excel is a great way to improve your Excel skills
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We know how popular pie charts are in business presentations, but pie charts and infographics is a marriage made in heaven. Let me share with you 16 cool ideas to add pie charts to your next infographic. I’ll add a brief comment to tell you what makes each unique
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I refuse to believe that a moderately clever person makes a 3D chart to get better insights from the data. The real reasons behind this behavior have nothing to do with data visualization, and impression management is one of them. Maybe this can be confirmed by research
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