Yesterday we were treated to discussions about the visitor stats of several Excel bloggers:

Chandoo: June was Pointy Haired Dilbert Blog’s Best month ever
J-Walk’s Spreadsheet Page Blog: June Visitor Stats
Daily Dose of Excel’s June Stats
PTS Blog’s Web Stats – June 2009
Debra’s Contextures 200906 Site Stats

I thought it would be interesting to compare some of my favorite blogs and web sites. Unless you have access to the data for each site, it’s not so easy. One service that lets you make comparisons is Alexa. Using Alexa you can compare up to five sites in a number of categories. I usually look at Reach, Pageviews, and Traffic Rank, which are defined by Alexa as follows:

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Chandoo’s Pointy Haired Dilbert blog had its best month ever in June, and he posted some stats to prove it. Congratulations, Chandoo!

Pointy Haired Dilbert statistics for June 2009

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In Using Colors in Excel Charts I discussed a lot of details about Excel colors, predominantly in Excel 2003, and specifically with charting in mind. I mentioned the Color Brewer, a neat little utility for selecting colors and designing color palettes. In ColorBrewer2.org Mark Harrower of Axis Maps announced Color Brewer 2, which updates the 8-year-old Color Brewer (that’s 56 in dog years, and 80 in web years, as Mark says). The new tool is available at ColorBrewer2.org.

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Web Meetings

I had a web meeting with a couple of my clients this week. Normally I use GoToMeeting for this purpose, but the client set it up, and we used WebEx. When I selected a service a few years back, I rejected WebEx in favor of GoToMeeting, because I thought GoToMeeting had the nicest, smoothest, most intuitive interface of all similar products. The WebEx experience this week reminded me why I chose GoToMeeting, and showed that WebEx has not progressed in several years.

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Nathan Yau of Flowing Data provided the inspiration for my first chart makeover as part of the Chart Busters program. Nathan asks, and answers, the question Does this Calorie Intake Infographic Work? Not Really. As Nathan says, the chart is “creative and visually appealing”, but it just doesn’t work.

The chart in question is a big round circular mess, posted on Flickr by Petra Axlund of 5W Infographics. Below is a smaller version of the chart, but you can see the original in all of its glory by clicking on this one.

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In LOESS Smoothing in Excel I described a technique for smoothing data, which essentially runs a moving weighted regression on the data set. The amount of smoothing that can be achieved without washing out the data is remarkable. In that post I showed a screen shot of a dialog of a working LOESS utility.

I’ve used this utility in-house for a while, adding little enhancements here and there. I’ve come up with three main ways to use it, illustrated in the dialog screen shots below. Based on the option selected in the top of the dialog, the mode of operation is changed.

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In recent months I have encountered a particularly troublesome error. It occurs in Excel 2003 and 2007 (and perhaps in earlier versions, but I don’t recall any such cases). The error is heralded by an unusually unhelpful error message, even my Microsoft’s standards: Microsoft Visual Basic - System Error &H80004005 (-2147467259). Unspecified error.

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The Chart Doctor Fiasco

I guess Chandoo and I touched off a major tempest in a teapot with our joint announcement last week of our New Feature: The Chart Doctor. Without realizing it, we had used the name of a similar feature on another blog.

As Kelly O’Day of ProcessTrends.com wrote in The Original Chart Doctor: Read more »

In Chart with a Dual Category Axis I showed how to make a chart with dual category labels (two rows of labels). In Individually Formatted Category Axis Labels I showed how to format axis labels individually by ignoring the built in labels and using an invisible series with individually formatted data labels. An attentive reader asked how to format the individual labels in a dual axis category axis, and the answer is: combine these two methods.

We’ll use the same data as in the original post.

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Chandoo of Pointy Haired Dilbert fame and I are starting a regular series of posts, entitled The Chart Doctor. We will start with charts that need help, either generated by our readers, or encountered by our readers on the internet or during their business activities. We’ll dissect the charts, and try to apply good visualization practices while displaying what the author thinks should be displayed.

At first we’ll concentrate on standalone charts, because reconstruction of a whole dashboard could take days.

Chandoo will lead one analysis, and I will lead the next. We’ll comment on each other’s approach, and if history is any indication,we’ll get lots of comments from you smart readers. I expect this series to generate some good discussions. So submit your best, or worst, charting examples to Jon or Chandoo, and join the fun.

Make an appointment with The Chart Doctor using this Google Form.