When I read Is your website’s underwear showing?, I couldn’t control the urge to write this one.
So the big screaming friday question everyone…
Is your chart’s underwear showing?
What is my chart’s underwear? you may ask.
My dear reader, it is the background color (that grayish shade excel adds by default). Also commonly known as one of the chart junk (no pun intended).
It is surprising how many people leave the default background color on, and yet spend countless hours working the rest.
What difference does it make?
It makes a hell of a lot of difference. Just set the background color to white and tell me if your eyes haven’t felt better.
Remember, only superman can get away showing his underwear. But, again he doesn’t have to work on spreadsheets and powerpoint like you and me. So, lets just hide that ugly background color. Ok?
3 Responses to “CP049: Don’t do data dumps!!!”
Your title got me nervous because I'm all about data dumps, but not for attaching graphics to data dumps. My reason for using data dumps is when someone is trying to do analysis and their starting point is a report that's formatted in a way for a human to read. I instruct them to stop with the report and go get a data dump: just rows and columns and rows and columns.
Agreed, nearly all of my reports start with 100+ lines of simple table data.
That way you can build your functionality around pulling information from that tabled information.
Yes yes!