Microsoft Office Online Training is the perfect example of what you should not learn about charts and data visualization.
Read Morebad charts
It’s very easy to use charts to support false arguments, distortions, omissions or outright lies. But you can use words and statistics too. If you want to deceive nothing will stop you. (Required reading: How To Lie With Charts and How to Lie with Statistics). Simple lies are often easy to spot and not very [...]
Read MoreHuman creativity is virtually limitless. But: You don’t vary color by data point. You don’t force the eyes to a pendular movement if you can avoid it. You don’t use a legend when you can use axis labels. You can’t have a residual category that large. Bloggers don’t seem to learn, even with a good teacher. [...]
Read MoreWhy do people insist on using “professional looking charts” in their presentations? If I wanted to divert the audience’s attention from the data, I would get a professional clown suit, instead. I would look professional. Not exactly the professional-looking presenter people expect in a corporate environment, but nevertheless a professional. Meet professional-looking Mr. and Mrs. [...]
Read MoreAnnotating your chart helps your audience to understand the reasons behind some patterns or outliers. But, please, please, don’t bury the data under boxes and arrows and busy grid lines, like this one on the right does (from WTRG Economics). How can you improve a chart like this? First of all, the series must be [...]
Read MoreMany misconceptions plague the field on information visualization. This post lists some of them and tells you how to remove those misconceptions.
Read MoreYou can add silly 3D effects to a pie chart, you can explode all the slices, you can compare multiple pie charts, you can use a legend instead of labeling the slices directly. This will probably render your graph useless, and make you look kind of dumb, but it is not the end of the [...]
Read MoreIn 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 get more than one million results, and a [...]
Read MoreI 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 they attempt to graphically display the results of [...]
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