If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!This bumps chart shows you the English Premier League 2007 - 2008. It allows you to highlight and compare two teams by clicking a team in in the table or a line in the bumps charts.

Interactively highlighting a data [...]

In a recent post Jon presented a way to dynamically hover over the chart legend to highlight a data series. Jon’s method is very smart, as it really shows the capabilities of the event rich Excel chart programing model.  The downside of this approach is that it requires you do code some VBA and only [...]

In financial report we are constantly comparing the actual numbers with our projections using variances.
A quick reminder
Absolute variance = Actual – Budget
Relative variance in % = (Actual – Budget) / Budget
Doing this over a report of even 10 lines requires row by row number comparison, and is not something which can be easily & quickly [...]

Here the history of the Abortion data set
1) Jorge used some U.S. Census Bureau data (original Excel file) to visualize the abortion ratio as a small multiples chart,
2) In Small Multiples - Abortion Data 1980-2003, I have written about Jorge’s panel chart. I like the panel (small multiples) chart, but felt that it can be [...]

Jorge used some U.S. Census Bureau data (original Excel file) to visualize the abortion ratio as a small multiples chart.

I like this chart as I am a big fan of small multiples displays. They help us to understand the nature of multi-dimensional data.
Jorge asked for suggestions to improve his chart and I came up with [...]

In chart design it’s good to make things simple, but you certainly should avoid oversimplification. As Einstein said:
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler"
Seth Godin presented in his blog The three laws of great graphs:
1. One Story 2. No Bar Charts [...]

“With hindsight, it’s easy to look at it with hindsight” - Glen Hoddle
Little did we suspect midway through the season that the Premier League would turn into a 2 horse race. Poor starts by both Man Utd. and Chelsea were transformed into a consistent run of good form which would extend the drama to the [...]

When the economy is growing and consumers happily spend all their money, “eye-catching”, dubious “professional-looking” charts seem to make sense in the grand scheme of a resource-wasting economy. But under recession, and on the threshold of a long economic Winter, those miscast charts are just bad jokes that should be banished from every book, every [...]

“To clarify, add detail”, says Edward Tufte.
A richer, more detailed picture, is a solid foundation for your decision-making processes. But to add detail you need a higher resolution display device (be that a computer screen or a sheet of paper), as we saw in the previous post.
Now, regarding the use of resolution, you have a [...]