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Effective Charts and Dashboards for Excel users

Archive for the ‘Practices’ Category

Shocking Revelation: Excel 2007 is Useless

Excel 2007 is useless. This was a shocking revelation when I tried to create the charts for last post (Chart Design: Abortion Ratios 1980-2003). It was my first serious attempt at using Excel 2007. I failed miserably and gave up. I had to do everything in Excel

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Why can't bloggers-about-blogging do basic charts?

I follow some of the top blogs-about-blogging and they often come up with advices that I can relate to when thinking of information visualization: simplicity, consistency, go to the point, remove clutter, tell a story… Problem is, bloggers about blogging fail to follow their own advice when

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Learn Excel, Spend More Time with the Kids

I love to spend time playing with my three-years old twins, and I wholeheartedly want to create for them the memories of a happy childhood. This is something that I can’t delegate, and if I don’t have the time, I’ll have to find it. They will not

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The consultant's chart: a dilemma

How do you sell your outrageously expensive consulting services? Simple, just add a chart… Not every chart will do, of course. Let me outline some basic design rules of what I call a “consulting chart”: It shouldn’t be recognizable as a standard chart that you could create

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Excel chart gallery: a difficult equilibrium

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Poll: Do you use VBA in your Excel files?

I just added a poll to the sidebar on the right (RSS readers might need to visit the site to see it). I’d like to know if you use recorded macros or write VBA in Excel. I ran an informal poll among friends and colleagues with catastrophic

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Video: Royksopp – Remind Me

I am sure that, if you aren’t a visitor from another planet, you already saw this video. I’m playing with the blog’s template during this week, trying to add interesting stuff from the information visualization point of view, like videos and images, and this is a good

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Letter to the Director-General of Eurostat

Dear Mr. Hervé Carré I’ve been browsing through some of the Eurostat publications and I thought you would appreciate some constructive feedback, since it is your job to ensure that governments, businesses, media and the general public do have access in a timely manner to reliable and

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How I won the Nobel Prize

Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Why? Why Al Gore? Thousands of scientists have been warning about the climate change for years. Why not them? Because of his political weight? Of course, but not only that. Because

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Design and information visualization: two worlds apart

Yes, I know about the Malofiej awards and the Society for News Design. Yes, I know that there are many many designers out there that really care about the data and use their skills to communicate effectively, sometimes with awesome results. Sacrificing data on the altar of

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