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 [...]

XL Cubed (parent company of BonaVista Systems, maker of the MicroCharts add-in for Excel) has shown some very effective dashboard report examples in a couple of recent posts.
In 2008 Excel Dashboard Competition Winners the winners of the 2008 Excel Dashboard Competition are announced:
1. Wade Stokes – International Bank Dashboard
Displaying many disparate Banking Key Performance Indicators, [...]

In Bad Graphics - Stacked Pyramid Chart, I critiqued a popular infographic display type, the pyramid chart. In this post I will repeat the favor for funnel charts. These are not the funnel charts which are also called tornado charts, and in some circles are used to construct population pyramids (see Tornado Charts and Tornado [...]

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 [...]

BonaVista Systems, the maker of MicroCharts 3 sparkline* software for Microsoft Excel and for Microsoft Analysis Services, has announced an Excel Dashboard Competition. The competition is for the best real-world Excel dashboard: supply your own data (suitably obfuscated, of course) and generate a dashboard using only Excel and MicroCharts 3.
*Sparklines are small (word-sized) but information-dense [...]

A few days ago, in Arranging Charts in a Grid, I posted a VBA procedure that arranged all the chart objects on a worksheet into a regular grid. This is pretty nice, but it arranges the charts left to right, then top to bottom, based on the Z stacking order of the charts. If you [...]

One effective way to present charts is to array them on a worksheet. You can lay them out manually, and even line them up nicely: by holding ALT while dragging and resizing charts, you constrain them to stick to the grid of cell boundaries.
However, if you have a lot of charts, this is tedious. I’ve [...]

One of the most misunderstood terms in business today is “dashboard”. When many people hear the phrase “dashboard report”, they think of the dashboard of their car, or even the cockpit of an advanced fighter jet, with fuel gauges, speedometers, and other displays crammed into a tight space. These displays are effective in your car, [...]

My daughter’s got a dentist appointment now, so I’ll try to whip off a quick post while sitting in the waiting room.
While looking up a topic on Charley Kyd’s ExcelUser.com site, I stumbled across his historical article The First Dashboard Used in Spreadsheets. This sample dashboard is so old, it predates Excel*. Charley presented it [...]

No time for a full post today (busy busy!), but I wanted to point you to a well written article by my colleague and fellow Excel MVP Charley Kyd of ExcelUser.com, who explains how to Create Cycle Plots in Excel to Chart Seasonal Sales Data.
If you simply plot date-related data, you may notice cyclical patterns, [...]