Last week, in You Have 1 New Notification On Klout!, I used social media metrics site Klout to illustrate how choice of axis scales can exaggerate or wash out the variation in a data set. Today I’ll pick on another social media metrics site, Topsy, to show how to pick meaningful axis tick spacing parameters. A [...]

Every so often I get an email with a subject line that’s something like “Jon, you have 1 new notification on Klout!” Wow, another social network thing, to go with all the other ones. Sure, I follow a bunch of people on Twitter every day, and I have a neglected Facebook account and a LinkedIn [...]

If you’re looking for a tutorial on breaking an axis scale, you won’t find it here. Instead you’ll read why breaking an axis is a bad idea, and you’ll get a tutorial in Panel Charts, which are a more effective (and easier) means to show your data. The Problem People frequently ask how to show [...]

In Excel, the difference between Line charts and XY charts has nothing to do with formatting the data with or without lines, and everything to do with different behavior of the X axes in the charts. I’ve written about these differences numerous times, in X Axis: Category or Value?, Scatter Chart or Line Chart?, Line-XY [...]

I came across a blog post called Is it just me? (software defaults), which asks the age-old question, Why Are My Excel Bar Chart Categories Backwards? The post was in a new blog by Alex Kerin of Data Driven Consulting. Alex works on projects in analytics and dashboarding. I have been asked this question a [...]

I was recently asked whether Excel can make an axis in which the value of each label was double the previous value, but the labels were equally spaced. I’ve covered custom axis scales several times (see Custom Axis Scales using Dummy Series), and this is simply another example. The specific question was about labels 1, [...]