Back in November I came across a new blog, called Data Driven Consulting. On this blog I found articles covering some of my favorite topics, including graphics and data visualization. I snooped around and discovered that the author of the blog, Alex Kerin, lives only 20 miles away from me here in the snow belt [...]

In Chart Point Limits in Excel 2010 I investigated the charting capabilities of 2010, in regards to the number of points allowed in a chart. I noted that charts with a million points took a while to redraw, but let’s not forget, a million points is a lot of points. I decided a comparison was [...]

In the old days, say, from Excel versions 97 through 2003, when you opened a workbook containing VBA code, you received a big ugly modal dialog box with the macro warning. You had to click a button on the dialog in order to continue. The dialog was annoying, but it was a reminder to allow [...]

I heard a rumor that Excle 2010 had expanded limits to how many points you could plot in a chart. From Excel 97 through 2007, you were limited to 32,000 points per chart series, and 256,000 points per chart. As far as I was ever concerned, this was more than enough points to make a [...]

As I wrote in My First Look at Excel 2010 and in Sparklines and Data Bars in Excel 2010, and as roughly 97% of the blogs in the whole internet have reported, Microsoft has just released the Technical Preview edition of Office 2010. I spent my first couple hours in Excel 2010 just driving around, [...]

There are two Conditional Formatting features in Excel 2010 which allow for graphical displays right in the worksheet. Sparklines, the word-sized graphical elements invented by Edward Tufte, are a new addition to Excel 2010. Data Bars were introduced in Excel 2007, but they have been improved and expanded in 2010. I gave each a test [...]