Software typically gets better with time. New graph types are added, more color palettes are available, and editing tools are easier to locate and faster to use. Excel 2013’s leader lines are an exception. Leader lines are those gray or black lines that connect the labels with…
Data bars are miniature within-cell bar charts. I primarily use them to quickly explore patterns in my dataset. Sometimes I decide to make an actual bar chart of the data later on. Other times, I’m simply using these tiny charts to help my brain spot…
In this photo, everyone, including the baby, appears to be paying attention to the person sitting in the center. Rakesh took this photo in 2007 when he visited his village in India where he spent first two years of his life. This was his first…
Let’s pretend you’re graphing age distributions for a given county. You carefully formatted your histogram: you removed the border, lightened the grid lines, wrote a descriptive title and subtitle, selected customized RGB color codes, and called attention to a section of the graph with the saturated action…
Last summer, my husband was traveling for work and I had the house to myself for an entire week. I could’ve binge-watched Sex and the City or eaten crumbly crackers in bed, his one-and-only marriage deal breaker. Instead, I designed my own chart taxonomy (while…
Just because I adore graphs doesn’t mean that I shun data tables. I insert the occasional table inside the body of my report, and each report’s appendices are full of tables, tables, and more tables. When creating traditional tables, I follow the Dark Horse Analytics guide….
We can all agree that 3-d exploding pie charts are pretty rotten. My vote for worst chart? The clustered bar chart. I see clustered bar charts everywhere. E-V-E-R-Y-W-H-E-R-E. On pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 of reports. In slides 1, 2, 3,…
Back in college I was so obsessed with data that I voluntarily wrote a 66-page thesis about adolescent development. The “Before” Version: Data Table in the Research Report My paper was filled with these: A major piece in the data visualization puzzle is understanding your…
What do you foresee happening in the visualization field this year? Promising changes are underway. You can move the field forward and further your own professional development at the same time. Repeat these mantras with me. This year, I resolve to: …commit to easier-to-read layouts. The…
At a recent Board of Directors meeting: “I think I’ll design a one-page annual report for the Washington Evaluators!” Draft 1 At the meeting: “Which metrics would we include? Maybe stats about the number of members, number of events held, brown bag topics….?” Look closely, can…