In the following example we work through a real world example of a data visualization. We’ve chosen an example that involves Operations data – this is fairly non-domain specific so hopefully it can demonstrate some important points. The first, and most important point is that you have to define your audience.
We receive many questions about [...]

Update 5/2/2009: Chart Tamer is released. You can download the final version here.
We released today a beta version of our latest BonaVista product Chart Tamer. We released Chart Tamer as a private beta to a group of Excel Experts: Jon Peltier, Charley Kyd, Jorge Camoes, Kelly O’Day, the folks at Juice Analytics, Rolf Hichert and [...]

MicroCharts our Excel sparkline tool enhances Excel with sparklines, bullet graphs and other in-cell charts. As MicroCharts is a font based charting technology you can utilize all the rich Excel text formatting capabilities:

Text alignment
Text orientation
Font size
Conditional formatting
Automatic alignment when the row height changes

  Use text alignment to align MicroCharts [...]

I attended beginning this week the Microsoft BI Conference in Seattle where Microsoft presented an interesting new product that might change the way you build your Excel dashboards in the future: "Gemini", an End-User Business Intelligence plug in for Excel.
End-User Business Intelligence has been around for quite a while with some of the most prominent [...]

I recently spoke at SQLBitsIII, and an aspect which went down well was a simple overview on how to make the most important aspect of a graph, namely the underlying data, the prime focus and clear and easy to read. I also had the opportunity to attend Stephen Few’s Information Visualisation Workshops in London, which [...]

In my last post I tied to fix an overloaded line chart Jorge presented in a recent post about loss aversion:
Jorge asked "does it make any sense to add those nine series to a single chart?“ My attempt to fix the chart by using some color [...]

Jorge wrote in a recent post about loss aversion, the fact that “people strongly prefer avoiding losses than acquiring gains”.
Loss aversion [...]: Translated to chart-making, it means that there is a “tendency to avoid losing data at any cost”. The chart below shows you the Money Income Of Households as published.

Take the above chart, for [...]

Ever wondered how to get a Micro Bar Chart or a bullet graph that automatically changes the width when you change the cell width?
The key to fitting a MicroChart into a cell is the CELL() function. The CELL function returns you information about a reference.  CELL(”width”,reference) returns the column width of the referenced cell. This [...]

Scott MacCloud comic writer and expert in visual communication created a set of wonderful, information dense comic pages for Google’s new web browser Google Chrome. He presents on 38 pages the technical concepts behind Google Chrome so that even a layman can understand them.

Regarding Google Chrome I found an interesting article over at the Cooper [...]

Update 5/2/2009: Chart Tamer is released. You can download the final version here.
We are about to release a new product we developed with Stephen Few that helps business users create better charts with Excel:
An Add-In Product Designed to Tame Excel’s Charts

No other software comes close to Microsoft Excel in popularity for analyzing and presenting quantitative [...]