This blog has been silent for three weeks, due to a number of other activities. To re-energize the blog, we turn to Chart Busters to clean up some unattractive and hard-to-read charts.
In Ugly Real Economic Growth Chart from Singapore Statistics, an Excel training service shows an ugly chart, then proposes another equally ugly chart as [...]

Last week I saw a link to Forecasting Your Traffic Growth Using Z-Chart, and thought I’d see what it had to say. The claim is that a Z-chart is a method of plotting data for single periods (monthly, for instance), along with cumulative totals (like year to date) and moving totals (12-month rolling total) in [...]

Edouard Buning is a Dutch marketing and communications consultant who has recently started up a Dutch blog in the spirit of Chart Busters. Edouard has provided this article for my Peltier Tech Blog readers.
Recovery by Sector of S&P 500 Companies by Edouard Buning
In Bloomberg Business Week of March 8, 2010 a graph on page 17 [...]

My friend Jimmy of Code for Excel and Outlook twittered about a chart on TechCrunch that showed the general online assessment of the Olympic coverage by NBC. How We Hate NBC’s Olympics Coverage: A Statistical Breakdown shows an analysis of nearly 20,000 tweets and 5,700 blog posts. The highlight of this analysis is the following [...]

While in line at the bank last week, I picked up a copy of the Worcester MA Telegram and Gazette, and stuck in the middle of the front section I saw a chart showing how much a family of four would have to pay for health care for the three health reform plans under debate. [...]

The Chart Porn blog referred me to an attractive but remarkably ineffective chart, in UK Quantitative Easing. The chart appeared in the British newspaper the Guardian, and shows the “money injected into the UK economy by the British government to help ease the recession.”  [cite] This illustration is reduced to fit; click on this image [...]

148Apps recently treated us to a fancy pie chart in Apple iTunes App Store Metrics, Statistics and Numbers for iPhone Apps which demonstrated how easy it is, if you’re not satisfies with how much a 3D pie chart can distort data, to add extra distortion. If ever there was a job for Chart Busters, this [...]

Kaiser of JunkCharts has posted twice in a couple days about some charts that compare the effectiveness of different profile photo topics, in terms of attracting a potential date. The article that led to the controversy is The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures on a site called OK Cupid. Kaiser posted first in Light [...]

In Yikes! Another Pie Horror Show, I was showing problems with yet another pie chart. I know the criticism of pie charts getting tiresome, but I wanted to respond to a comment by Jeff Weir:
Q: What’s worse than comparing categories within a pie chart?
A: Comparing categories between 2 pie charts.
I will use an article [...]

My friend Debra Dalgleish notified me the other day that it was National Pie Day.

I missed National Pie Day, but while reading The Real Reason Outsourcing Continues To Fail, I encountered a pie chart that gave me indigestion. It purports to show problems with inter-cultural relationships that lead to outsourcing failures.