Every Friday I post a photograph to share it with my readers and get review comments.

The above photo was taken when I visited Columbus Zoo last Saturday.

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Time for another week of ogling at cool visualizations. What a week it has been for the chart makers

Super cool visualization of 2008 Box office collection

This is an area chart modified to indicate how a movie has performed everyweek, thus the movie markers go down (except for dark knight) after 1-2 weeks

Onion Maps - 3d outlines of buildings colored and mashed up with google maps

Onion maps is the new kid on the mapping sites space and they have managed to come up with something unique and cool. Currently the maps are available for few cities across the world (you are seeing hong kong downtown in the image), they give interesting statistics about the city like big-mac index.

The star wars galaxy and well known hyperspaces, now mapped

[large version]

If you are a star wars freak like me, then you will love this map. [via Darkhorse]

Changing car sizes - comparison

Although not strictly a graph, this photo published on Winston Salem Journal makes the point very effectively. [via infographic news]

Silhouette of Towns in Middle ages and Now

Most of the times, the purpose of a chart is to sell one idea, convey one message or prove one point. And this silhouette of towns does that very well.

And of course there is NY Times Bubble visualization of Olympic Medals that I discussed here.

Also see:

• Cool Infographics - [July 31]
• Cool Infographics / Charts of the Week [July 24]

Hope you liked this edition of cool infographics. If you have any infographics / charts and want them to be featured here, drop a comment

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Validating your data as you type can prevent any surprises when you are doing analysis / follow-up on the data. Thankfully, excel has the right tools to do it. In-cell drop-down lists or combo boxes can assist you in picking up a value from a valid list to enter in a cell. Here is a short how-to guide to get you started on data validation in excel.

1. Select the cell where you want validation, go to Data > Validation

   

2. Specify the validation criteria

   

   In the data validation dialog box, select “list” for type of content to allow in the cell (as you can see, you can also validate data based on other conditions like length of text, data type, formula results, more on this in another post)

   In the source field start typing valid values separated by comma, for eg. if you want to allow only first 6 months to be entered in the field, type January, February, March, April, May, June

3. See the validation in action

   When you press ok, your cell will now look like this.
   

4. Doing more: Fetching the validation list from another range of cells

   Instead of entering all the values that can go in to the cell in the data validation source field, you can maintain the data in the spreadsheet and refer to in the validation criteria. See below:

   

More Excel Tips: How you can copy validation criteria from one cell to another, Master IF functions in Excel - 5 tips, 15 fun things you can do with excel now

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Dashboards are daily staple for some of us who need to report status to our bosses, present them in weekly meetings or generally CC half the world with what is up on our end.

There are several ways in which you can spice up the dashboard, one of the simple things to do is, to replace the standard Red, Green & Amber with Smileys Just follow these 3 simple steps add smileys to your dashboard.

• First create a dashboard as usual

  Of course, this is what you do everyday, so move on to next one

• Add a column to display smiley symbols

  The standard spreadsheet fonts like Arial, Verdana or Comic Sans (ahem) do not have smiley symbols as characters. You need to change the font to “Wingdings” (just select the cells, hit ctrl+shit+f to change the font), in this font, the characters JKL stand for respectively.

  Thus, in order to show smileys in the new column you can write a simple if formula like =IF(target < sales,"J",IF(target > sales,”L”,”K”))

• Finally, add conditional formatting to change the smiley color

  Select the smiley cells, and launch conditional formatting dialog to specify conditions to change the color of cell contents. For eg. red when sales < target, blue when sales > target and gray otherwise as shown below:

  

So go ahead, wow someone with a smiley dashboard.

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When I saw the Olympic medals won by each country by year infographic on nytimes my jaw almost dropped, go ahead see it and come back, I am sure you will love it too.

It is one of the coolest visualizations I have seen in the recent past and I see infographics all the time, its my passion.

So, I wanted to see if this infographic can be done in Excel, not pixel to pixel, but something close enough to pamper my ego. I was able to create something that looked like this:

Download the Total Olympic medals won by each country since 1896 excel sheet and play with it.

If you want to know how this is done, read on
(more…)

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On Saturday we went to Columbus zoo, apart from enjoying the lions, penguins, birds, I have also learned 5 simple yet effective lessons in visualization.

1. Design your charts for kids - assume your audience knew bare minimum and curious

Above shown is a typical Zoo-mate info dashboard that you can see next to any animal in the Zoo, All the information that a kid needs to know to enjoy the reptile is shown there, a photo, whether the snake is venomous, what it eats, how endangered it is on a gradient scale and where its found usually.

2. Highlight information that is crucial, leave the rest

This is “How to read a Chameleon” next to Chameleon cage, quickly tells how to understand what you are seeing. But if you need to know more about the colors, the research behind it, there is a bigger section beneath this.

3. Use images, examples that your audience can relate to

This is the “measure your ecological footprint” exhibit. They have actually shown various sizes of shoes to compare ecological footprint of various Nationals - India, China, World average, US (not shown) so that kids can easily understand the point.

4. Remember, your audience is there to look at you, listen to your story, the chart is just an enabler

This is outside the area where tigers are kept. Obviously very few people stopped at this infographic, people are all curious to see the tigers. But this chart does tell a very good point about declining tiger habitat across the world, they have used 2 colors per each tiger to convey the point. No gradients or anything… just 2 colors, one for where tigers thrived earlier, and one for where they are today, and the point is obvious for even a kid.

5. Finally, have fun

Outside the building where reptiles were kept, I found this. Having fun in what you do is as much important as telling your story, selling your ideas.

Happy charting

PS: excuse the poor quality of images, it was dark in most of the places.

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How can you ensure that your blog post, term report or business case is readable without spending a lot of time getting beta reviews from others?

Thanks to google docs, you can do that with one click. Just upload your word document / txt file to google docs. Once inside, goto menu > tools > “word count…”

With this you can find out various readability statistics of your content like:

• Average sentences per paragraph
• Average words per sentence
• Average characters per word
• Average words per page
• Flesch Reading Ease: Higher score means easy to read, ranges from -21.9 to 121
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: Indicates the grade (number of years of education) required to understand this text
• Automated Readability Index: Indicates the minimum grade required to understand this text, alternative to Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level

So, next time when you are writing something ensure the readability.

Other tools for improving readability of your content: check readability online

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