For the past two months or so, I have been absent from the blog. Sure, I’ve answered questions and replied to comments people have left. But new articles have been scarce.
I have plenty of excuses for this, and none of them involve not having any topics worth posting. I’ll describe a few of them, and [...]

Excel Charting and Dashboarding
Westborough MA, June 2

Jon Peltier (Peltier Technical Services) and Alex Kerin (Data Driven Consulting) have put together an intensive one-day Excel Charting and Dashboarding session. Topics include:

Intentions and approaches
Data quality
Effective graphic techniques
Designing a dashboard
Combination charts
Dynamic and interactive charts
Advanced chart formatting
Charting and dashboard tools for Excel

If you have any questions, contact Jon Peltier.

I recently posted about Stacked Bar Chart Alternatives and included some rather cluttered charts with markers and lines, which I referred to as “Dot Plots”. I was called to task by none other than Naomi Robbins, author, researcher, consultant, and renowned expert in the field of data presentation graphics. Briefly, Naomi recoiled at the [...]

I wrote a post last month called State of the Blog – Year End 2009, but that was more of a “looking forward to 2010″ kind of post, with all the great stuff I want to do. I thought since I was reviewing my site statistics anyway, I’d share some of it.
In 2009, I posted [...]

The last several months have been busy for me, professionally and otherwise. My business model has changed to incorporate more click-wrapped software utility sales and less project work, and I would like to do more training once the economy can sustain it.
The Excel Charting Utilities “division” of Peltier Technical Services is an outlet for many [...]

In Custom Axis, Y = 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 I showed axes with base 2 logarithmic scales in both Excel 2003 and 2007. In Excel 2003 it is necessary to transform the data to get the intended result. In Excel 2007, the axis can be achieved with the untransformed data.
In the previous post, the data [...]

One of the best usability features in Microsoft Windows is the context menu, also known as the right-click menu. That’s the menu that pops up under the cursor when you right click the mouse, and it shows what actions are available for the object you’ve right-clicked on. It’s a great shortcut to these actions, and [...]

I’ve had an unintentional holiday from posting, partly due to overloading with client work, and partly due to continued fixing up of my New Computer. It’s usually fun and exciting to get a new computer, but when you have to do most of the setup without access to your old computer, it takes much longer [...]

It finally happened. The laptop I’ve relied on so heavily for the past few years has given up the ghost. For the past couple weeks, it has occasionally shut down. It seemed like a thermal control issue, and propping the machine up on blocks to let air circulate underneath helped, for a while. But Wednesday [...]

Web Meetings
I had a web meeting with a couple of my clients this week. Normally I use GoToMeeting for this purpose, but the client set it up, and we used WebEx. When I selected a service a few years back, I rejected WebEx in favor of GoToMeeting, because I thought GoToMeeting had the nicest, smoothest, [...]