Comments on: Better Chart of the Day

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:49:43 +0000

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jon_Peltier: New on the PTS Blog: http://zz.gd/eb86c7 Better Chart of the Day…

By: Ray R.

Ray R. — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:11:32 +0000

Great redo of a highly flawed chart in my opinion.

By: Morten Eghøj

Morten Eghøj — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 19:35:36 +0000

http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/18/iphone-nabs-46-pecent-of-japanese-smartphone-market-the-tiny-ja/

One more mobile graphs which could need some cleaning :)

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:16:04 +0000

Naomi -

Who’s making the charts here, anyway?

Joking aside, as usual, you’re right. The axis label should saysomething like ” Millions of Users (log scale)”.

By: Naomi B. Robbins

Naomi B. Robbins — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 20:53:29 +0000

Most intelligent readers would recognize a equally spaced scale of 0.1, 1, 10, 100 as a log scale. Does the next one, which certainly improves the spacing of the data, need some explanation?

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:26:18 +0000

Tony -

Yeah, I was thinking about that too. But I thought a light gray wasn’t too disruptive.

Another problem is that the irregularly-spaced log scale gridlines I added in the last chart fall in front of the lines and markers, because I hacked it and used error bars.

Coming soon: a technique to simulate gridlines that puts the lines behind (most) other chart features.

By: Tony Rose

Tony Rose — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:21:59 +0000

Another little option to clean up the chart since we are nit picking with the M’s is to remove the outline that you have in gray. By doing that, the labels will be easier to read too. Just because Naomi started…

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:16:49 +0000

Gary - To compare growth rates, we can convert the Y axis to a logarithmic scale:

That one spreads out the axis scale too far, since Excel 2003 only uses powers of ten for the min and max of a log scale. But I know afew tricks, so here's one with a nice log scale:

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:14:01 +0000

Here's one for Naomi, without the redundant labels:

By: Gary

Gary — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 17:25:08 +0000

Also interesting would be the growth rates and absolute # changes for the 6-month period… RIM looks like about 40% total growth; Apple 80+%, MS close to zero, hard to say on the little ones. On a numbers basis RIM appears to be keeping pace w/ Apple, which is interesting too.