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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This Heatmap Table shows you the revenues and the discounts of a company over the course of one year per product group. The size of a bubble shows the revenue made in a particular month and the bubble color shows the discount rate given. The discount rate has been encoded as a range of green [...]

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 series in a large data set is very powerful. All lines in the data set are [...]

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 [...]