In Can You Improve this Graph Showing Suicide Rates in Japan?, Nathan of FlowingData shows a chart of long-term unemployment rates and suicide rates in Japan. The chart comes from Suicide Epidemic in Japan.

What’s wrong with this chart (which I’ve reproduced below)?

Axis label is faulty. “Japan and Suicide Rate” should be “Japan Long Term [...]

In yesterday’s post, Add a Target Line, I showed how to add a simple horizontal line target indicator to a chart. What if your target isn’t constant. I’m not talking about your boss’ moving target, but a case illustrated by the following dummy data. Our company makes widgets, which are more popular in spring and [...]

Usually in order to characterize plotted data more completely, it helps to add a target line to your chart. There are a number of ways to do this in an Excel chart. If your chart is a column chart, you can add another column series, you can add a line series that spans the middle [...]

There has been a lot of discussion here lately about XY and Line charts:

Line Charts vs. XY Charts
Line-XY Combination Charts
Category Axis Tricks for Line and Area Charts - 1
Category Axis Tricks for Line and Area Charts - 2
Order of Points in XY and Line Charts

Many of these posts have described differences between XY and [...]

My friend Debra (of Contextures and Contextures Blog fame) sent me a link to GraphJam. She said “Some not so good, other are quite funny. . . . now I’m getting out of there, before I waste any more time.” Like I need any help wasting time.
I’ve seen the GraphJam site before, of course, but [...]

There has been a lot of discussion here lately about XY and Line charts:

Line Charts vs. XY Charts
Line-XY Combination Charts
Category Axis Tricks for Line and Area Charts - 1
Category Axis Tricks for Line and Area Charts - 2

One interesting thing about a line chart with a date scale X axis is the order of the [...]

Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge introduced the concept of Bullet Graphs a few years ago, and their use as a replacement for various gauge charts is slowly expanding. Bullet graphs are easier to read than the many gauges that adorn poorly designed business dashboards, while taking up less space and breaking the ineffective metaphor of [...]

In Interactive Multiple Line Chart I showed how to make an interactive chart that allows the user to select from among a number of series using a listbox, and the selected series is displayed in a chart.

A similar technique is described in Interactive Parallel Coordinates Chart on my web site, and I used this technique [...]

In the Microsoft charting newsgroup, SKP asked how to make a chart that he could easily change from one series to another. This post will detail the steps to make an interactive chart that allows the user to select from among a number of series using a listbox, and the selected series is displayed in [...]

In Chart Design: Abortion Ratios 1980-2003 Jorge Camoes shows a nice panel chart of Abortion Ratios vs. Year (1980-2003) for different age groups, taking US Census Bureau data. I reproduce a few panels of Jorge’s chart below; click on the chart to see his entire panel chart.

Jorge points out the downward trend in the curves [...]