BonaVista Releases Chart Tamer
by Jon Peltier
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2012.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
BonaVista Systems, the makers of the MicroCharts family of sparkline and dashboard utilities for Microsoft Excel, has released a new product called Chart Tamer. Chart Tamer is designed to simplify and beautify Excel charts. Actually, I should not say “beautify”, because that implies embellishment. Chart Tamer simplifies and clarifies Excel charts.
A peek at the Chart Tamer dialogs shows how it accomplishes its goals. First, Excel’s available chart types have been whittled down by eliminating pie and donut charts, radar charts, and all 3D charts. Based on the relationships which you wish to display (more than one can be selected for each chart), and on how you wish to feature this information, Chart Tamer offers a subset of these for you to select from.
For example, if I want to display some time series data, Chart Tamer disables chart types which are unsuited for this data.
The resulting chart is clean, without the extraneous elements of a default Excel chart. By default the chart includes the legend, which I’ve deleted in the sample below. I’ve also enlarged the chart within its enclosing shape, to reduce the expansive borders typical of Excel charts prior to 2007.
I’ve left out the dialog that allows you to show chart and axis titles and gridlines.
Chart Tamer cleans up charts by employing color schemes designed by an expert in human visual physiology. Colors can be defined for the data elements of the chart . . .
. . . and for non data elements as well.
Chart Tamer can be used to clean up existing charts using the settings for new charts. Chart Tamer includes a color picker to help you format cell text and background colors, and it includes a cell border formatting feature (below).
One issue to be aware of is that Chart Tamer changes the default palette in your Excel 2003 installation, replacing those awful default Excel colors with its own eyesight-friendly shades. In general this is a good thing, unless you’ve customized your palette to match your company logo or favorite sports team’s uniforms.
I tested the beta version of Chart Tamer, but haven’t done anything more than drive this version quickly around the block. The beta operated smoothly, and didn’t break anything; so far the final version looks good as well.
BonaVista Systems offers a 30-day trial of Chart Tamer. They didn’t pay me anything to write this review, they didn’t even ask. I just thought it was something that my readers might be interested in.
Related Posts:
- Excel Chart Color Update
- What Goes into the Price of Gas?
- 9 Steps to Simpler Chart Formatting
- Series Lines: Useful or Chart Junk?
- Chart Redrawing Performance of Excel 2003 and 2010
- Pardon the Interruption
Posted: Thursday, April 9th, 2009 under Utilities.
Comments: 9
Comments
Comment from libin
Time: Thursday, April 9, 2009, 11:55 pm
That is good,but this tool is useless for me.The form of a chart is ever-changing,We can not just use this tool to create a chart that we real need!
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Friday, April 10, 2009, 6:19 am
Libin -
I don’t understand your point. The charts made by Chart Tamer are true Excel charts, just with cleaner formatting. You can add or remove data and other chart elements as with any Excel chart. If the problem is that you need a more complicated chart, you can use Excel’s regular charting mechanisms, or you can start with a Chart Tamer chart. Also, it may be wise to review your chart design, because often a complicated chart is one that is trying to do too much, and all it does is spread confusion.
Comment from libin
Time: Friday, April 10, 2009, 10:20 am
“you can start with a Chart Tamer chart” I agree with you.This interactive charting tool has brought us a lot of convenience. But it may do each of us has the same chart.It make us chart lack of personality and professionalism.
My English is not very good, the meaning of the expression is not very clear.
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Friday, April 10, 2009, 10:37 am
I understand fine now. You are thinking of everyone’s charts looking the same. This isn’t just a problem with Chart Tamer, it’s a problem with Excel itself. How many ugly charts have we all seen with the dull gray background and the dark blue and bright pink series plotted on them? And are Excel 2007′s charts much of an improvement? If Chart Tamer’s charts are all very similar in appearance, at least they’re more attractive than Excel’s defaults.
It is possible to change the colors used by Chart Tamer, and you can always reformat a chart independent of the utility. Chart Tamer uses the default Excel font as far as I’ve noticed.
Comment from Dale Warren
Time: Saturday, May 2, 2009, 5:39 pm
Jon,
Box plots and dot plots and harnessing the power of Excel’s charts and color paletta to focus on the data instead of the decorations? I love it.
As a recent adopter and raving fan of BonaVista’s MicroCharts for Excel, I have been meaning to check out their latest Excel toolkit. From their product documentation and your review, it sounds like this add-in effectively promotes the vision of Edward Tufte and Stephen Few for more information rich graphics with fewer distractions.
Thank you for building such an information rich website!
Dale W.
Comment from Dale Warren
Time: Sunday, May 3, 2009, 10:01 am
After playing with the eval copy of Chart Tamer for a few hours, I really like it.
Excel’s default choices for color palette never made much sense to me, and Excel’s native charting options include lots of bad charts and poor default settings for the purposes of data visualization. Chart Tamer does a nice job of providing an alternative, with reasonable and well explained defaults for data visualization, and a nice tool for customizing one’s Chart Default colors — provided one can live with Chart Tamer’s recommended palette (with only 4 empty spots for your custom colors, which seem likely to be a few colors one is used to having available from Excel’s default palette).
Chart Tamer’s three new chart types — “that aren’t currently available in Excel: dot plots, strip plots, and box plots” — are useful, yet still a tad disappointing. Unlike Jon’s creative dot plots, the Chart Tamer dot plots are just nicely formatted line plots (with filled circles and no lines). Not so hard to do yourself with categories on the X axis, but use Jon’s Dot Plotter add-in if you want to do it with categories on the Y axis. The Chart Tamer strip plots resemble Minitab dotplots, using a simple trick that I hadn’t thought of using, with N series of dots of the same color to show the distribution for each X category. Unlike Jon’s Box & Whisker Plot, the Chart Tamer box plots require the input to be *your* 3-number or 5-number data summaries — curiously ordered as { Max, Q3, Q1, Min, Median } — or whatever estimators you’d like to use! — rather than the raw data. No outlier detection (Tukey fences) like Jon’s utility, though.
In summary, BonaVista Chart Tamer is a innovative Excel add-in that brings Excel a lot closer to contemporary/minimalist standards for charting data, instead of “business as usual”. The three extra chart types are useful, especially for those who aren’t already using Jon’s Excel utilities (or relying on Minitab for graphical data analysis). BonaVista will get my $39.
Comment from Chandoo
Time: Tuesday, May 5, 2009, 11:05 pm
Jon, I completely agree with your review. I found this to be a wonderful little tool for quickly refining the way charts look and feel. There are few problems with box and whisker plot as Dale pointed, but I guess it is a good start (and I dont really make box plots that often, so I can live with it)
I have also written a review of this, over at http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/05/04/review-chart-tamer/
Comment from Liu ‘s chart blog
Time: Thursday, September 3, 2009, 11:37 pm
If used in excel2007, how will chart tamer deal with the color ? since the color system in 2007 is different to 2003.
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Friday, September 4, 2009, 10:11 am
Liu -
Since it does not have to hijack palette tiles for its colors, I presume that the Chart Tamer just uses the colors it wants, and leaves the defined theme colors alone.
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