Just a quick public service announcement.  A fellow whose twitter name is wiesel started a twibbon group called Pie Charts Must Die. If you join (click on the last link), your twitter avatar will display your support for this worthy cause.

This is an entry for John Walkenbach’s Excel Oddities page, or perhaps for Bob Umlas’ next This Isn’t Excel, It’s Magic! book. I filed it under “Amusement”, becausse I didn’t know where else to put it. When you copy and paste charts in Excel 2003 and earlier when the window isn’t zoomed to 100%, you [...]

Just one link today. . .
Fancy Charts & Graphs, from The Big Picture by Barry Ritholtz

Thanks to Sjoerd Hoogwater for the link.

It’s a week early for Pi Day (next Saturday, 3/14), but Dilbert has provided us with a nice pie chart.

It does illustrate the unnatural popularity of the genre, don’t you think?
Original at Dilbert comic strip for 03/07/2009 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.
Thanks to Dermot, who emailed this to me moments before I saw [...]

Like me, you probably spent years scribbling all manner of pointless line graphs and bar art at school, but you’ll now find it tough to rule two lines, plot some points, and stick a best-fit curve through the whole merry lot without making it look like a car crash in flatland.
So says Nick Cernis in [...]

In Paper-Based Pie Chart Graphs, the information aesthetics blog shows a pie chart that isn’t printed on paper, but is actually fabricated out of paper. It came from Paper Graphs, on Nicholas O’Leary’s knolleary blog. This seems to be more a work of art than a chart, so maybe it’s okay.

Federico gives us this excellent example of a 3D pie chart, thanks to GraphJam.

You haven’t seen many new posts from me lately. Between the East Coast Excel Users Conference at the end of September and the Excel Visualization and Dashboarding Boot Camp last month, I’ve been busy. And it seems that each week away sets me three weeks further behind schedule.
I have plenty of topics I’m working on, [...]

I found this item amusing. Microsoft isn’t the only software company accused of screwing up a user interface. Even the magical Google isn’t always right.
Redesign of iGoogle Sparks User Outrage

Google recently rolled out a significant redesign of its iGoogle homepage and already users are complaining that the new version is a giant step backwards. The [...]

I know I’ve railed against dial gauges in the past, and I’ve removed instructions for creating a speedometer type chart from my site. But this particular implementation is completely appropriate.

From The New Yorker Magazine.