One of our readers Jennifer mailed me with this excel charting problem she is having. I thought why not ask other readers for their advice on this. So here it goes:
The Charting Challenge – Visualizing Changes in Market Share
Here is an excerpt from her email:
The gist of my problem is how to show change-in-market-share between time period 1 and time period 2 for two different products in the cleanest, easiest-to-grasp way.
One of the restrictions that I have are that I have to somehow show both the fact that the mkt shares add up to 100%, and the changes.
However, I am concerned that the main takeaways; increases in competitor 1 is being driven by decreases in competitor 2 … might get lost.
The sample data along with the initial graphs she has built are shown below:
you can access the market share data at this shared google doc.
Now, the question for you is: How would you improve this graphs to bring out the message?
Here are few ways I could think of:
- Reversing the competitor order to 1 at bottom and 5 at top so that comparison can be easy
- Changing the stack overlaps from partial to full so that the step-case look can be removed.
- Instead of stacks, using regular bar charts with 5 sets of columns, 1 each for a competitor and using colors to bring contrast between period 1 and period 2.
Your turn…
PS: you can post images in comments by uploading the images to a free site like flickr or photobucket and then copy pasting the image link in the comment box.
