Archive for August, 2008

The other day my wife told me that we dream about a total of 6 years in our life, an average of 2 hours for everyday you sleep. [Source: wikipedia on dreams]. That is almost as much time as you would work in 30 years (30*50*40/24/365, assuming you work 40 hours a week for 50 […]

Smashing Magazine is one of daily hangouts for new design ideas, inspiration and ogle fun. When they featured Pixel Breaker’s Polar clock last Friday on Top 10 creative ways to display time, I knew this could be an interesting visualization to do in excel. So I have created a donut chart in excel that can […]

Took this in Columbus zoo almost 2 weeks back, still no fresh photos, hopefully this weekend I should put my d40 to some use. We are driving down to Niagara Waterfalls on the US / Canada border in few mins, see you all on Monday. You have a good weekend 🙂

While surfing some of my regular reads on the google reader, I saw this feed ad from google adsense. The ad looks like a text ad with scroll bars. I have never seen scroll bars on text ads by google, so out of curiosity I clicked on the scrollbar and dang, it launched me to […]

Every week, this blog features 5 of the best visualizations from the last week around the web. Average gas prices in US regions from 1993 plotted in dynamic bar Flowing data takes a look at the historical gasoline price data and provides us this eye candy. My friend Jon takes a look at this and […]

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, […]

If you ever had to simulate random outcomes in excel sheet, you might have already heard of about the spreadsheet function rand(), this little function generates a random fraction between 0 and 1 whenever you use it. So I usually write =round(rand()*12,0)int(rand()*12)+1 if I need a random number between 0 to 12. Of course, if […]

Excel formulas can always be very handy, especially when you are stuck with data and need to get something done fast. But how well do you know the spreadsheet formulas? Discover these 15 extremely powerful excel formulas and save a ton of time next time you open that spreadsheet. 1. Change the case of cell […]

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 […]

I use google suggest to get new post ideas, I start out by typing “what is”, “who is”, “how to”, “when is”, “where is”, “excel” and see all the suggestions Google comes up with. If I see something interesting I would mark the search topic and use it for posting here. And for the last […]

Next time you want to make a chart to tell how your sales (defects, customer calls, page views, number of clicks, walk-ins etc.) are doing over a period of time, consider showing them in a min-max chart. For eg. a min-max sales chart for the last 12 months tells average, minimum and maximum sales per […]

This is another wow feature in Google maps that I started seeing last week. You can search restaurants by cuisine, how simple yet how effective .. 🙂 Click here to see all the Pizza places near Empire State Building in New York. Earlier on Gmaps: Get directions by public transport, See 3D building outlines in […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]