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 to make sense
- Visually revolting, even with perfect data points
2. Dont show, just eat your donuts
why?
- This is the evil twin of Pie
- Too many data points and it looks psychedelic
- Very difficult to compare between series
3. Don’t add dimensions to your lines
why?
- It is difficult to compare between series
- Can lead to wrong conclusions
- Often one series overlaps another to cause ambiguity
4. If one Pie is bad, two of them is worst
why?
- They provide very little information
- It is useless to use two pies, when you can tell the story with just one
5. Dont make your charts look like downtown
why?
- Lost information because of overlapping columns
- Difficult to see patterns
- Needs a lot of tweaking to make even the remotest sense
6. Save the unstacked area charts till we have x-ray vision
why?
- It is impossible to understand an unstacked chart in 2d, 3D makes it only worse
- They need lot of tweaking to make some sense
- Visually revolting, even with perfect data points
When in doubt, use a bar
More on charts: 73 beautiful excel chart templates – download free
15 Responses
Nice site and I would say clever use of excel but for this post I don’t really agree with #4.
#4 is infact a v useful way of depicting sub divisions inside a particular category.
If you are including everything in single pie, it will mean that those sub categories are different individual categories in themselves.
I agree with you. I work with an agriculture company. I have to show areas and further sub division of the area as portion of the crops acerage. #4 is the best chart to use for that.
I disagree with point #5 – downtown can be good, as long as you only have 2 or 3 Empire State Buildings, and everything else is 10 storeys or less (approximately !).
I made one that I use at work – will be happy to post it here if I can work out how . . .
@Gerald: usually downtown charts look ugly even with few (10) rows of data. But in rare cases where only one item is very large compared to others (As in your case) they may look good.
Btw, you can share your chart by saving it as an image and uploading it to a free host like flickr.com and linking it through comments. I know it is a bit lengthy process, but due to excessive spam I had to do this.
Welcome to PHD 🙂
Gotta agree with #1 comment. :3
I have the exception that proves the rule for Rule #1. I work at a power plant, and my gas turbine has an array of temperature probes in the exhaust. The probes are physically installed in a circular layout. Representing an actually circular array is the only good use of the radar plot. If my link worked, you should see an obvious dropping-off of temperature at probe #4.
Here’s the picture:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10510792@N02/3258702122/
I have used radar charts ( be assured, i am not superman…… 🙂 ) extensively to show process health of a plant / unit . The six points are different health parameters and the wider the rada opens up, it is better health
I think Bar Chart is the best way of depicting the data in structured mode.