We (datavis folks) like to believe that one of the key advantages of charts over tables is that charts are much better at providing context, displaying patterns and so on, while a tables “merely” gives you the exact value. Fortunately, life is not that simple. Many people
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What is wheat and what is chaff? Here is a list to help you take sides: If you want to fit the data into the shape of real-world objects, that’s not data visualization; If you use more than one dimension to represent a data point, that’s not
Read more →Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet wrote on Twitter: Redistricting should be done with data & open source software, not by humans. Let me be completely honest: I don’t like golden calves and I can spot two in this single sentence: technology and data. Yes, redistricting should
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We stop loving someone or something when we feel there is nothing more to discover, when we have no more questions, when we don’t care about the answers. I started writing my Data Visualization for Excel Users series because I have an unhealthy number of open questions.
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Data visualization is about finding and communicating patterns. But here is an often-forgotten truism: patterns are not some kind of ready-to-wear knowledge. You can look at a chart and have an epiphany and the person next to you can dismiss it as useless. Let’s see why. Is
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There are many approaches to data visualization. Take well-know authors like Tufte, Cleveland, Ware, Few, Bertin or McCandless. There is some overlap, but they all approach data visualization from a different angle. That’s great news for you: this means that you can come up with a unique
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Get a cheap pedometer and a pair of comfortable walking shoes and walk 10,000 steps per day. It you don’t want to be an Olympic champion that’s all you need to improve your wellness and raise awareness towards a healthier lifestyle. If 10,000 seem too much don’t
Read more →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
Read more →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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