Archive for 'Formatting'
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
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
The Perils of Being in 3D
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
Whenever I am faced with a 3D chart I think of the song lyric I’ve used as the title of this post, taken from Pardon Me by Incubus. I also think of the following chart, which was submitted by thiswasmyclone to the b3ta challenge: graphs. (I didn’t add a hyperlink, because I didn’t want to [...]
Posted: Thursday, April 10th, 2008 under Bad Charts, Charting Principles, Formatting.
Comments: none
Secondary Axes that Work - Proportional Scales
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
In my last post, Secondary Axes in Charts, I described an essay by Stephen Few in which he concluded that secondary axes provide no benefit to good infographics. I have come to the same conclusion myself: secondary axes are more likely to confuse and obscure the data, than to clarify relationships in the data.
In the [...]
Posted: Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 under Charting Principles, Example Charts, Formatting.
Comments: 2
Arranging Charts in a Grid
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
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 [...]
Posted: Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 under Formatting, VBA.
Comments: 4
Clustered Bars as an Alternative to Stacked Bars or Bubbles
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
Last fall, Many Eyes posted a bubble chart to show US Beer Shipments by Supplier. They made the chart using a visualization technique they call the matrix chart, which essentially supplies a matrix of rows representing one parameter, columns representing another, and a graphic at each grid location representing some value. In this case, the columns [...]
Posted: Thursday, March 6th, 2008 under Charting Principles, Example Charts, Formatting.
Comments: 5
VBA Conditional Formatting of Charts by Series Name
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
I’ve got a couple of tutorial pages on my web site that deal with conditionally formatted charts. The trick is to set up ranges containing formulas for each of the conditions, so that if the condition for that range is met, the range contains the value to plot, otherwise it contains #N/A, which isn’t plotted [...]
Posted: Monday, March 3rd, 2008 under Example Charts, Formatting, VBA.
Comments: 19
VBA Conditional Formatting of Charts by Value
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
I’ve got a couple of tutorial pages on my web site that deal with conditionally formatted charts. The trick is to set up ranges containing formulas for each of the conditions, so that if the condition for that range is met, the range contains the value to plot, otherwise it contains #N/A, which isn’t plotted [...]
Posted: Monday, March 3rd, 2008 under Example Charts, Formatting, VBA.
Comments: none
VBA Conditional Formatting of Charts by Category Label
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
I’ve got a couple of tutorial pages on my web site that deal with conditionally formatted charts. The trick is to set up ranges containing formulas for each of the conditions, so that if the condition for that range is met, the range contains the value to plot, otherwise it contains #N/A, which isn’t plotted in [...]
Posted: Monday, March 3rd, 2008 under Example Charts, Formatting, VBA.
Comments: none
Using Colors in Excel Charts
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.
Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge is a reknowned expert on data visualization for analysis and communication of quantitative business information. He is the author of Show me the Numbers and Information Dashboard Design, two books that explain techniques which display information effectively, and why these techniques are an improvement over common practices and over the defaults of common [...]
Posted: Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 under Charting Principles, Formatting.
Comments: 12


