A reader emailed me this chart of GDP, with actual values through late 2008 and projected values for the next two years. To illustrate the uncertainty in the predictions, colored bands were drawn alongside the solid line prediction. The bands become lighter as the distance from the prediction line increases. The reader wondered how to [...]

I recently posted a tutorial showing how to construct Marimekko Charts in Excel. Based on Stephen Few‘s earlier analysis of Marimekko Chart in A Design Problem, I followed up with The Problem with Marimekkos, in which I showed a couple of approaches to charting the same data, partly based on a multiple bar chart approach [...]

In Marimekko Replacement – Overlapping Bars (Easy) I showed a quick and dirty way to make an overlapping bar chart that used only bar length, not rectangle length, width, and area, to encode values. The “easy” method in that tutorial was limited in that the data needed to be symmetric (equal numbers of rows and [...]

I showed an overlapping bar chart alternative to a Marimekko chart in my recent post The Problem with Marimekkos. I gave very few clues about how to construct such a chart, so now I’m showing the protocol. The approach shown here is somewhat simplified, and works only when the grid is symmetrical, with the same [...]

This tutorial shows how to create Marimekko Charts, including the specialized data layout needed, and the detailed combination of chart series and chart types required. This manual process takes time, can be prone to error, and becomes tedious. I have created the Peltier Tech Marimekko Chart Utility to create such charts automatically from raw data. [...]

Several months ago, in Column Chart to Replace Multiple Pie Charts I showed how a column or bar chart could display a table of data more effectively than four pie charts could. Another alternative is to build a panel chart, a shown above.