I’ve written about Excel chart error bars in Error Bars in Excel Charts for Classic Excel and in Error Bars in Excel 2007 Charts for New Excel. Both articles contained instructions for adding custom error bar values for individual points, but judging from the emails I receive, a separate article on custom error bars is [...]

In Plotting Values Against Limits, I showed a few ways to compare some values (in this case, hourly wages) against recommended limits. In this post I’ll show a Box Plot approach to displaying this same data. The box plot will include the familiar boxes for the inner quartiles and whiskers for the outer quartiles calculated [...]

In a comment to another post, Lynn buttered me up a bit, then asked how to make a certain chart for her boss. Lynn has to plot ten employees’ hourly wages against recommended maximum, minimum, and medium wages. Only four actual wages fall within the recommended limits. I can think of many ways to plot [...]

Last week in Quick Analysis of Web Browser Stats I provided a line chart (“timeline”) to augment Ed Bott’s discussion of Google Chrome’s inroads in the browser market (from Chrome takes a bite out of IE and Firefox). Ed occasionally revisits the relative market share of the different browsers, but it’s not a regular monthly feature. [...]

In Chrome takes a bite out of IE and Firefox, Ed Bott describes how Chrome has started eating into the browser market share of both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Ed’s analysis looks right on, but he was rather light on data visualization. I figured I’d help out with some enhancements to Ed’s data presentation.
Ed looked [...]

In Make a Copied Chart Link to New Data I showed how to copy one sheet with data and a chart, or a data sheet and another sheet with a chart, so that the new chart links to the new data. The protocol is more complicated than you would expect the first time you get [...]

I showed in Easier Interactive Multiple Line Chart and in Gas Prices – Interactive Time Series how to use a listbox to highlight a particular series. This keeps its alignment, but also won’t work on a chart sheet.
In Chart Event to Highlight a Series, I showed how to use a chart legend plus chart events [...]

There are many reasons to add data to an Excel chart. Your data may not be ideally arranged to plot it all in one selection. You may decide after the fact to include more information. You may have received another month’s data to plot. You may be adding dummy data to generate some of the [...]

ProBlogger.net recently polled its readers, to see which blog platforms were most common, and published the results in What Blogging Platforms Do We Use?
I use self-hosted WordPress, called WordPress.org in the ProBlogger results. WordPress is by far the most popular platform, with loads of features and thousands of third-party plugins, and I find it  interesting [...]

When plotting data in a line or XY chart, it can be very deceptive to use the Smoothed Lines option. Here is a sample XY chart with dummy data, that has smoothed lines, and no markers to help decode the shape of the data.

It’s hardly a better infographic than a kid using chalk on the [...]