Imagine having two annoying little bloggers looking over your shoulder and trying to mess up with the chart you are making….
I am still waiting, go ahead, imagine…
Now come back, that is exactly what “The Chart DoctorBusters” is all about. It is a new series of posts on PHD and Jon Peltier where we take badly made charts, one at a time and suggest improvements, alternative visualization options and corrective measures.
For a doctor to be really good, he needs to have really sick people. In our case we need bad charts. I mean really bad ones with all those 23 colors or 17 pies or stressful extra grid lines or .. ok, you get the picture.
Here is what you should do:
- Upload your chart or excel workbook to a public site like skydrive.
- Now go to this google docs form and submit your charts
- (alternatively you can tweet us on @r1c1 or @Jon_Peltier)
Here is what Jon and I will do:
Every week we will take one of the really bad charts and post an entire article dissecting the problems and prescribing the treatment. We will take turns, so one week it will be Peltier and next week it will be me. We will also try to comment on each other’s treatment. With some luck, we should get other leading authorities in charting world to come and comment here.
Some rules to keep in mind:
- We are talking about charts here, not complicated dashboards or vibrating visualizations.
- As much as possible try to post the actual data associated with the chart and tell us clearly what you think the chart was trying to achieve.
- Remember, even parapsychologists get psyched.
- Have fun 🙂
8 Responses to “Introducing PHD Sparkline Maker – Dead Simple way to Create Excel Sparklines”
This looks like it could be very useful for a project I'm putting together right now, thank you so much. Quick & silly question, how do I copy & paste the sparkline as a picture?
Question answered. For anyone else:
Select chart>Hold Shift key & select Edit/Copy Picture>Paste
[...] more information about PHD Sparkline Maker, please read this article and to learn more about Sparklines, read this article from Microsoft Excel 2010 blog. Also there [...]
Am I right in thinking that the y-axis is set automatically by excel?
That makes it possible to get the column chart not to start at zero.
Andy - yes, it is currently set to 'auto', which defaults to a zero base for positive values, but you can change that by left-clicking the chart, then choosing (in Excel 2007):
"Chart Tools/Layout/Axes/Primary Vertical Axis/More Primary Vertical Axis Options"
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: When manually editing a chart's minimum/maximum axis values, PLEASE be sure there's a valid reason and that doing so won't skew the message shown by the data (e.g. by exaggerating differences). If in doubt, go back and read Tufte. (W.W.T.D.?)
[...] gridlines, axis, legend, titles, labels etc.) and resize it so that it fits nicely in a cell [example]. This is the easiest and cleanest way to get sparklines in earlier versions of excel. However this [...]
thanks for the work creating the template!!!!
looks good