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
Read more →If you follow Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, you know I’m shamelessly stealing this post title from him. He says that most of the time a list is sorted alphabetically because a) it’s easier to find a name and b) designers are lazy and don’t want to bother finding
Read more →1. Tufte, the Father of Eye-Candy Charts Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, published in 1983, is probably the most influential book in the history of data visualization, and it is likely to remain so for some more time. In his book, Tufte outlines for the
Read more →Annotating 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
Read more →Loss aversion – wrong chart example JunkCharts writes an interesting post on how loss aversion can happen in chart-making. The general concept of loss aversion tells us that “people strongly prefer avoiding losses than acquiring gains”. Translated to chart-making, it means that there is a “tendency to
Read more →Wow is Beauty, Eureka is Knowledge. Wow alone is a dumb blond, Eureka alone is a decrepit old wizard. Great information visualization is 20% meaningful wow and 80% useful Eureka.
Read more →Always ask yourself: “what can I remove from this chart”? Remove Excel defaults, remove grid lines, make the chart smaller, use soft colors, remove irrelevant labels, remove the legend (by directly labeling series), remove series that you don’t really need, remove frames, remove decimal places, remove visual
Read more →You can’t write a novel just because you can type. You can’t create a chart just because you know how to do it in Excel. First, you have to know the job, then the tool. Research for best practices in your field. Read what some authors have
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