I learned from Tim Mayes in Office Labs Chart Advisor for Excel that Microsoft’s Office Labs has developed an add-in that advises you based on your data what chart type you should use. From the Office Labs Chart Advisor page:
Chart Advisor is a prototype that provides an alternate approach for creating charts in Excel 2007. [...]

In Plot your data around the clock, Chandoo proposed a complicated bubble chart to show website traffic vs. time of day.

I thought it was daring of Chandoo to try such a unique treatment of the data, but I found the bubbles difficult to interpret, and it was distracting that I had to look from chart [...]

My friend Chandoo proposed a chart to show website traffic vs. time of day in Plot your data around the clock [Excel charting idea]. He thought he’d use the analogy of a 12-hour analog chart, and put a bubble at each hour, where the size of the bubble is related to the pageviews during that [...]

There has been a lot of discussion here lately about XY and Line charts:

Line Charts vs. XY Charts
Line-XY Combination Charts
Category Axis Tricks for Line and Area Charts - 1
Category Axis Tricks for Line and Area Charts - 2

One interesting thing about a line chart with a date scale X axis is the order of the [...]

Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge introduced the concept of Bullet Graphs a few years ago, and their use as a replacement for various gauge charts is slowly expanding. Bullet graphs are easier to read than the many gauges that adorn poorly designed business dashboards, while taking up less space and breaking the ineffective metaphor of [...]

Nathan Yau of FlowingData asks Can You Improve this Mediocre Statistical Graphic?

So what’s wrong with this chart?

In A Gauge Chart That Works?, Clint describes his efforts to come up with a dial-type chart that isn’t as terrible as most. He comments that Stephen Few’s Bullet Graphs are unfamiliar to most people, which is true, ans they’ve only been around for three or four years. Bullet graphs and most gauge-type charts are [...]

In Chart Rules, As Simple as Possible, But Not Any Simpler!, More Information per Pixel! (the blog of XLCubed, the BonaVista Systems - MicroCharts parent company) has posted some comprehensive chart type selection guidelines, to follow up the recent brouhaha over pie and bar charts. It’s not inappropriate to repurpose a quotation from Einstein, because [...]

There has been a lot of discussion about pie charts and bar charts lately. I and many other know-it-alls have clearly stated that pie charts are the red-headed stepchildren in the family of chart types. In Peltier Loves Pie I provided some guidelines to follow if you still insist on using pie charts.
In this post [...]

Cynthia makes a mean cranberry-apple pie, and also a black bottom pie featuring a chocolate cookie crust, layers of chocolate and eggnog flavored pudding, and whipped cream. So you could accurately say that Peltier Loves Pie. But not pie charts.
There has been a lot of discussion about pie charts and bar charts lately. See for [...]