In the 38th session of Chandoo.org podcast, Let’s optimize data to ink ratio of your charts.
What is in this session?
In this podcast,
- Announcements
- What is Data to Ink Ratio?
- Obvious ways to optimize Data to Ink Ratio
- More ways to optimize Data to Ink ratio
- Highlighting what is important
- Conclusions
Listen to this session
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS
Click here to download the MP3 file.
Links & Resources mentioned in this podcast
Recommended Books for creating better charts:
- Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few
- Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte
Optimizing data to ink ratio – Charting case studies
- Closing gaps in gender equality chart
- Why 3D pie charts are evil…
- Visualizing world education rankings
Techniques for highlighting what is important
- Display alerts in dashboards to grab user attention
- Adding meaning titles & legends to charts
- Never show simple numbers in your dashboards
Invitation to “Becoming a better analyst” Webinar
As mentioned in the podcast, I am running my first ever webinar on Wednesday, July 15th – 2015 (2PM EST). The topic is “How to become a BETTER analyst?”
Please click here to register for the webinar & become a better analyst.
Transcript of this session:
Download this podcast transcript [PDF]
How do you optimize Data to Ink Ratio?
What about you? Do you worry about data to ink ratio when making charts? How do you optimize it? Do you have a process for it? Please share your tips by posting a comment.
Subscribe to Chandoo.org Podcast
11 Responses to “Fix Incorrect Percentages with this Paste-Special Trick”
I've just taught yesterday to a colleague of mine how to convert amounts in local currency into another by pasting special the ROE.
great thing to know !!!
Chandoo - this is such a great trick and helps save time. If you don't use this shortcut, you have to take can create a formula where =(ref cell /100), copy that all the way down, covert it to a percentage and then copy/paste values to the original column. This does it all much faster. Nice job!
I was just asking peers yesterday if anyone know if an easy way to do this, I've been editing each cell and adding a % manually vs setting the cell to Percentage for months and just finally reached my wits end. What perfect timing! Thanks, great tip!
If it's just appearance you care about, another alternative is to use this custom number format:
0"%"
By adding the percent sign in quotes, it gets treated as text and won't do what you warned about here: "You can not just format the cells to % format either, excel shows 23 as 2300% then."
Dear Jon S. You are the reason I love the internet. 3 year old comments making my life easier.
Thank you.
Here is a quicker protocol.
Enter 10000% into the extra cell, copy this cell, select the range you need to convert to percentages, and use paste special > divide. Since the Paste > All option is selected, it not only divides by 10000% (i.e. 100), it also applies the % format to the cells being pasted on.
@Martin: That is another very good use of Divide / Multiply operations.
@Tony, @Jody: Thank you 🙂
@Jon S: Good one...
@Jon... now why didnt I think of that.. Excellent
Thank You so much. it is really helped me.
Big help...Thanks
Thanks. That really saved me a lot of time!
Is Show Formulas is turned on in the Formula Ribbon, it will stay in decimal form until that is turned off. Drove me batty for an hour until I just figured it out.