If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!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 [...]

After much deliberation and debate, we are pleased to announce the winners of the 2008 Excel Dashboard Competition. We were impressed by many of the entries, and thanks to all of you who entered. It’s good to see MicroCharts being put to effective use, and adding value in such a variety of business scenarios and [...]

In my last post I suggested some chart selection rules as an alternative to Godin’s Silly Rules for Great Graphs. Jerome commented:
[...] on a slide, you want to convey one message. your graph must NOT carry any information that can be interpreted differently than the point you are trying to make. the corollary is that [...]

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 [...]

An interesting optical illusion is the so-called Hermann Grid illusion: the effect of seeing gray dots at the intersections of a black grid on a white background or a white grid on a black background.

 
 
 
 
While it’s an interesting optical illusion, it’s something we should avoid in management reporting:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Tables formatted with medium or thick black or [...]

“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 [...]

Sean blogged the other day about using a treemap to visualize the drivers of the Australian Inflation. He got inspired to create a treemap by an NYT article that used an interactive version of the following treemap:

This chart looks nice on the first view. It makes nice use of muted colors, the shapes look well [...]

You have finished your great looking, very efficient Excel dashboard. Now, how do you share it? How do you make sure the users have a timely access to the latest update? This can be a serious issue, specially if you have a more tech oriented audience, and it must be addressed at the planning stage. [...]

This is the first of two twin posts where we’ll discuss the alpha and omega of Excel dashboards: data access and dashboard publication. These are two weak areas in Excel, and they should be approached carefully when planning for a new dashboard. Let’s start by reviewing the available data access options.
Copy / Pasting data
Are you [...]