An Enormous Infographic In Anyone But Romney: The GOP race so far, the National Post shares an enormous infographic with us (click for full size image).

Here’s a problem that I’ve heard people ask (and complain) about. They’ll have data in their workbook, neatly sorted from top to bottom. When they make a bar chart, the sorting is reversed, with the Bottom data appearing at the top of the chart. Not only that, but the series are in backwards order too. [...]

Stacked column charts in Excel offer a feature called “Series Lines”. These are lines between the stacks, connecting the tops and bottoms of corresponding blocks in adjacent stacks. At first glance, these lines seem useful, because the lines will converge or diverge depending on changes in value of a series from stack to stack.

Sales Funnel Graphs Sales funnel graphs are used to represent the development of sales leads into actual sales, or conversely the attrition of sales leads before they become actual sales. In the example below, A might represent web site visitors, B visitors who accessed the specific sales page for a product, C visitors who clicked [...]

In Suicide vs. Homicide by State, per 100,000, Bourree Lam of Freakonomics posted a chart related to a recent Freakonomics podcast that discussed why suicide is “twice as” prevalent in the US as homicide. All of the charts here show suicide or murder rate per 100,000 population. I’ve recreated the clustered bar chart below. The common [...]

Recently Naomi Robbins, author of Creating More Effective Graphs, and I discussed the difficulty of making Excel use appropriate axis tick spacing to chart binned data that has unequal bin widths. The example I’ll use here to describe the problem is taken from page 286 of Naomi’s book, under the heading Do not use equally spaced [...]