Archive for 'Charting Principles'
Dynamic Charts
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
Oh no, not another article about Dynamic Charts! There must be dozens of articles on the interweb about dynamic charts, some of them even useful. I didn’t even write the first Dynamic Charts article on my web site; that honor goes to Debra Dalgleish’s Dynamic Column Chart. Debra enjoyed writing that tutorial so much, she [...]
Posted: Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 under Charting Principles, Data techniques, Dynamic Charts.
Comments: 6
Stacked Area Chart Challenge
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
Ganesh, a reader of my web site, asked whether I could make a chart like this one:
The series are shown as a fluctuating blue Value line and a steadily increasing red Limit line in the line chart below, but Ganesh wanted to color code regions in the chart, so that regions where the value exceeded [...]
Posted: Thursday, May 8th, 2008 under Charting Principles, Example Charts, Formatting.
Comments: 12
Column Chart to Replace Multiple Pie Charts
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
Someone asked in the Microsoft Excel Charting newsgroup, “How can I put four pie charts in a printed page, but only have one legend?” Well, the answer to that question has three parts.
Use a single legend for multiple charts.
Use data labels.
Don’t use pie charts.
I’ll address these answers in the order stated above, even though the [...]
Posted: Friday, May 2nd, 2008 under Charting Principles.
Comments: 16
Introducing Control Charts (Run Charts)
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
Introduction to Control Charts
While employed as a scientist/engineer for a large manufacturing corporation, I pulled a stint as trainer for my company’s Total Quality program. This role occupied half of my time for three or four years. A large component of our Total Quality initiative was related to Statistical Process Control (SPC). And of all [...]
Posted: Thursday, May 1st, 2008 under Charting Principles, Data techniques, SPC, Statistics.
Comments: 2
Statistical Process Control
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
Statistical Process Control (SPC) is a set of statistical and related methods for monitoring processes with an aim to improve productivity and reduce costs, time, and waste incurred by these processes. In fact, SPC is a philosophy surrounding the monitoring, analysis, and adjustment of process variables to produce continuous improvements in the process.
There are a [...]
Posted: Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 under Charting Principles, Data techniques, SPC, Statistics.
Comments: 5
Dynamic Chart using Pivot Table and VBA
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
In Using Pivot Table Data for a Chart with a Dual Category Axis, I showed how to make a Chart with a Dual Category Axis using a pivot table to properly arrange the source data. I generally prefer using a regular chart, because pivot charts are pretty inflexible when it comes to formatting. Unfortunately, a [...]
Posted: Friday, April 25th, 2008 under Charting Principles, Data techniques, Dynamic Charts, Example Charts, Pivot Tables, VBA.
Comments: 2
Dynamic Chart using Pivot Table and Range Names
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
In Using Pivot Table Data for a Chart with a Dual Category Axis, I showed how to make a Chart with a Dual Category Axis using a pivot table to properly arrange the source data. I generally prefer using a regular chart, because pivot charts are pretty inflexible when it comes to formatting. Unfortunately, a [...]
Posted: Thursday, April 24th, 2008 under Charting Principles, Data techniques, Dynamic Charts, Example Charts, Pivot Tables.
Comments: 2
Using Pivot Table Data for a Chart with a Dual Category Axis
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
Tony commented on the previous post, Chart with a Dual Category Axis, asking whether I’d use a pareto chart for this data. I commented that it almost was a pareto chart, since at least within each category the data is sorted from high to low. Then I got to thinking, if I put my data [...]
Posted: Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 under Charting Principles, Data techniques, Example Charts, Pivot Tables.
Comments: 2
Chart with a Dual Category Axis
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
Through appropriate arrangement of your source data, you can give your chart a dual category axis. This approach works with chart types that have an “Category” type category (X) axis, that is. line charts, column charts, and bar charts. The chart below shows defect rates in several different components, which are grouped into a smaller [...]
Posted: Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 under Charting Principles, Data techniques, Example Charts, Formatting.
Comments: 3
Candlestick Alternative: Individually Colored Up-Down Bars
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
A candlestick chart is used to show stock price performance, typically daily; a bar shows the daily change from the opening to closing price, with different colors for gaining and losing changes, and lines extend from the bar to the daily high and low.
I was recently asked how to apply different arbitrary colors to individual [...]
Posted: Monday, April 14th, 2008 under Charting Principles, Example Charts, Formatting.
Comments: none
Bad Graphics - Stacked Pyramid Chart
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
I was directed to the web site for UberBI after reading The Uber Art of Dashboards on the Dashboards by Example blog. I want to say a few words about this chart, a stacked pyramid, which is featured prominently on one of UberBI’s displays.
Stacked Pyramid Chart
I occasionally read the Dashboards by Example blog, although I [...]
Posted: Saturday, April 12th, 2008 under Bad Charts, Charting Principles, Dashboards, Example Charts.
Comments: 22
Dynamic Ranges to Find and Plot Desired Columns
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
Dynamic ranges (or “Names”) are commonly used to identify a range of the appropriate length, so that a chart will plot the right number of points. For example, you may want to plot year to date sales, without blanks for the months which are still in the future. The dynamic range uses COUNT or similar [...]
Posted: Friday, April 11th, 2008 under Charting Principles, Example Charts.
Comments: none


