Cool Info-graphics of the Week [Sep 5]

Once every week Pointy Haired Dilbert celebrates the art of chart making by sharing 4-5 of the best info-graphics featured in various web sites. Click here to see the visualizations featured earlier.
Anatomy of a Great Speech - Obama’s acceptance speech at DNC

Presentation Zen captures Obama’s symphony like acceptance speech in a graph shown above. Do [...]

Microcharting in Excel - 7 Alternatives Reviewed

With each passing day the amount of information contained in a single spreadsheet, slide, document is growing. Thanks to demanding bosses, clients and colleagues, we are now supposed to provide all the relevant information in as much less space as possible.
This is where micro charting or light weight data exploration has become a rage. [...]

6 charts you will see in hell

Often it is easy to get carried away with a tools features. Excel is no exception. But here is a list of grotesque charts that you should never make, not even on your last day at work.
1. Leave the radar charts for Spidermen

why?

You can hardly conclude anything by looking at them
They need lot of tweaking [...]

Display symbols in excel chart axis

Here is a quick excel tip to make your charts look professional by showing symbols in the axis labels instead of text.
Just follow these 4 simple steps:

First identify the symbols you want to show on the axis or as data label from symbol fonts like webdings, wingdings or a custom dingbat font like company [...]

It is show time baby! - better designer clocks to display time in your spreadsheets

My polar clock using donut charts in excel started a conversation and readers have been awesome enough to download the excel and create their own clocks to show time. Even though the idea of this blog is share the little that I know with you, it is amazing how much I have learned from you [...]

Plot your data around the clock [Excel charting idea]

If your reports include hourly distribution of data like,

Customer footfalls in your store
Page views of your site
Customer service calls to your toll free numbers

here is an interesting charting idea to show the data around the clock (literally)

Update: Visualization pros Jon Peltier and Jorge Camoes took a critical look at this, nearly fainted at [...]

The Olympic Medals by Country Chart - Improved now

My Olympic medals by country year visualization in excel is received well by readers. I got few interesting emails on it.
Robert from Germany shares an interesting approach at doing this, by doing a heat map of the medal counts on an outline world map. This is very impressive and involves flood filling countries with a [...]