Group Smaller Slices in Pie Charts to Improve Readability
Jon Peltier can stand on his roof and shout in to a megaphone “Use Bar Charts, Not Pies”, but the fact remains that most of us use pie charts sometime or other. In fact I will go ahead and say that pie charts are actually the most widely used charts in business contexts.
Today I want to teach you a simple pie chart hack that can improve readability of the chart while retaining most of the critical information intact.
Waterfall Charts using Excel
Learn how to create waterfall charts in Excel in this tutorial. Our guest author, Aaron, explains how to create cool looking waterfall charts with connectors. Waterfall charts are great, especially for visually showing the contribution of parts to a whole.
Are you excited about this twitter chart?
In this ironically titled “Let’s not get too excited” chart, David shows us how the twitter community is divided. Can you guess what is wrong with this chart?
Charting Lessons from Optical Illusions
The other day while doing aimless roaming on the dotcom alley, I have seen some cool optical illusions. There are so many valuable lessons optical illusions can teach us – chart makers. Don’t believe me? Look at the bubble chart illusion on the left and tell me which orange circle is bigger? What is your answer? Right or left. Well, my friend, the answer is both are of same size. Read the rest of this post to find some cool optical illusions and what they can teach us – chart makers.
14 Basic Skills for Chart Makers (Big question: How many do you have?)
Blame John Walkenbach if you don’t like this post. There, I said it. He started the 14 basic skills for men. And then added 14 basic skills for women. Not stopping there, he went ahead and added 14 basic skills for dogs. Debra at Contextures blog added her 14 cents by writing 14 basic skills for excel users.
I got jittery and quickly searched 14 basic skills for people writing 14 basic skills posts on google. Alas! nothing found. But being the inveterate non-give-upper I went ahead and prepared my list.
<drum roll> here is the,
14 basic skills for people making charts (or graphs or plots or ok, you get the point)
Project Management: Show Milestones in a Timeline [Part 3 of 6]
Learn how to create a timeline chart in excel to display the progress of your project. Timelines are a good way to communicate about the project status to new team members and stake holders. Also, download the excel timeline chart template and make your own timeline charts.
Excel Links – Bacon bits are good edition
In this edition of Excel Links, we feature a new excel blog on the blog, named bacon bits. We also share links about interesting articles like generating tinyurls using vba, making maps using xy charts, designing filters for your dashboards and more.