I often write about practical software how-tos. But at my core, I’m software-agnostic. I don’t care which software program you choose. I’ve seen stellar visualizations in good ol’ Excel and downright embarrassing visualizations in fancier software programs whose salespeople pretend that their software is a…
I give dozens of workshops, webinars, and conference keynotes each year. Which means I receive dozens of evaluation surveys each year. After my sessions, the clients who sponsored the workshop ask their participants to rate my session. Sometimes the satisfaction surveys are electronic. Other times, the satisfaction…
“Ann, my bar chart is upside down! Help!” You read my prior post about using horizontal bar charts for nominal variables like favorite fruits. My toddler is eating two! bananas a day so bananas are the winner in this fictional fruit contest. Our original table…
“Ann, I read your latest post, and I accidentally made a horizontal bar chart when it should’ve been a vertical bar chart! Am I going to have to delete my graph and start from scratch?” No way. Don’t delete a thing. That would be a huge…
“Ann, should my bar charts be horizontal or vertical?” Ordinal variables get vertical bars Ordinal variables follow a natural progression—an order. I arrange ordinal categories from left to right so my viewers can view the sequence across the page, which means their bars are vertical. Use…