You’ve exhausted the built-in and online help provided by Microsoft, and don’t have what you need. So where do you go to get help in Excel? There are a large number of resources available to you. Search engines, online forums, and a number of useful general Excel topic web sites, and a huge selection of [...]

There is quite a discussion ongoing in Business intelligence vs. infotainment on Nathan Yau’s Flowing Data blog. It all started with a marketing guy from Teradata praising the innovation of the data visualization of David McCandless, designer of The Visual Miscellaneum. Stephen Few responded to Teradata’s praise of McCandless’ work in Teradata, David McCandless, and [...]

I’m continually discouraged by people’s misunderstanding of the term “Dashboard” as it relates to understanding their company’s performance. A good dashboard doesn’t have loads of colors and visual effects. A good dashboard isn’t overwhelmed by logos and pictures of actors masquerading as happy employees and customers. A good business (executive, operational, etc.) dashboard is not [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 thought [...]