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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Jorge suggested in a recent post to Use Charts to Validate Your Tables. He used a data set of the US census bureau that had some incorrect data in it. Creating a simple line chart on the data set immediately revealed that there is one extreme outlier in the data set.

The Internet has introduced us to the great idea of providing more detail with just a click using hyperlinks. Now our new, free Excel add-in lets you do just that in your Excel dashboard.
As Andreas mentioned last time, our new function - the ParamLink - is perfect for drilling into the detail of a dashboard. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Well, since you are reading this, I’ll assume that you took the red pill, so let’s keep moving and find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.
We saw that people usually design charts larger than they need to be. Why? Is it because we can’t fit the data into a smaller space? No, it isn’t. [...]

Size matters, and (chart-wise) the smaller the better. In this series of posts we’ll discuss how you can greatly improve your data analysis and communication efficiency just by designing smaller charts. Reducing chart size forces us to remove unnecessary junk, and it is a first step in a journey that will lead us to [...]