I admitted to my obsession with maps in Virtual Globes. A lot of visualizations are based on maps and globes. Some of them are even well done.

In Map of the remotest places on Earth Enrico Bertini cites an article in New Scientist called Where’s the remotest place on Earth? which reports a European Commission/World Bank study that determined how “remote” each location is, based on travel time from the nearest place with 50,000 inhabitants.

The New Scientist article also shows detailed maps of the density of roads, railways, navigable rivers, and oceanic shipping lanes.

Upcoming PTS Training Events

Second Excel Dashboard Boot Camp – May 2009: Join Jon Peltier and Mike Alexander in an intensive three-day training session covering advanced data and charting visualization techniques for Excel dashboards.

Advanced Excel Conference, June 2009: Two days of advanced Excel programming and charting on the Boardwalk with Bob Umlas and Jon Peltier.

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I’ve been amused by the cartoons in The New Yorker magazine since I was a kid. Here’s a joke about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Office Palooza

MSDN® is sponsoring a coding contest for Office 2007, named OfficePalooza! This sweepstakes will run two weeks beginning April 20, 2009, and features ten fun Visual Basic of Applications™ (VBA) coding challenges in the form of puzzles and games. Each entrant will earn a chance to win one of hundreds of available prizes, determined by a random drawing at the end of the contest.

Do my eyes deceive me? Microsoft is actually promoting that red-haired bastard stepchild, VBA? This is a welcome change in policy. The Office product groups have continued to support VBA, despite the snubbing by the development groups, who preach all things dot-net. I’m sure dot-net is good and all, but it’s overkill for 98% of the projects accomplished in Office using VBA.

Some of the challenges are a bit silly, but I think that’s the intent. As long as the light atmosphere of the Office Palooza doesn’t indicate consideration of VBA as a sideshow or clown act.

At least a couple of the Excel challenges look like conditional formatting or creative worksheet formulas would do the trick, but then, Exceldom is littered with VBA routines that reinvent existing Excel functionality.

Image Formats

Excel Guru Ken Puls asks what is the Best picture format for scaled charts? He evaluates a number of formats, both raster and vector, for use in dashboards. He didn’t use actual charts, nor explain why not.

Ken is coauthor of RibbonX (right). This is a tremendous resource for dealing with the Office 2007 ribbon interface, and it’s the book I use most often nowadays.

Ken also has written the XLG Favourites Add-in, which is a useful extension of the Most Recently Used concept. It provides a flexible, customizable menu where you can keep your favorite files and directoriesa mere click or two away. It’s a great timesaver: I use it several times a day.

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Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
 

Chandoo makes the list twice today (wait until he gets my invoice). In Fun way to clean up modern art with visualization he points us to a TED talk by Swiss artist and comedian Ursus Wehrli, Ursus Wehrli Tidies Up Art. The author of  Tidying Up Art (right), Ursus reveals his orderly Swiss upbringing by straightening out some rather chaotic modern art. For example, he turns the Keith Haring painting Untitled into an orderly collection of shapes, sorted by size and color. This is not unlike the deconstruction I attempted on a donut chart in Leave the Donuts for the Cops, and Stick with the Bars (below).

Tony Rose treats us to a bar chart of European male life expectancy in The Healthy Years of Life [Chart Review]. The chart is from The Economist, but it’s more like the puzzle in back of People magazine: find ten differences between the two pictures. Hmm, the runner lost his shoes, his shirt is missing, he put on a headband, he’s lost ten pounds, his bald head is covered with a sweatband. Let’s see, that’s five. Oh hey, there’s a chart behind him, didn’t see it there. Um, the scale doesn’t start at zero, the tan bars (while reminiscent of one’s diseased later years) are not nearly as visible as the yellow, so I missed them aat first, the bar shadows make it hard to judge where the bars end.

In The Art of Nomography I: Geometric Design Ron Doerfler describes the theory and mehods of construction of nomograms, graphical tools that simplifies derivation of an unknown quantity when other quantities are known. A simple nomogram is a conversion scale between the Celsius and Fahrenheit temperature scales, shown below at left. More complex nomograms can be used to interpret more intricate relationships. The scales in the S-P-V nomogram below center has nonlinear scales to incorporate exponents in the relationship. Intricate relationships may even use inclined lines and curves. The figure at right reminds me of transparency overlays we would use in grad school to determine crystallographic orientation of our samples from x-ray diffraction patterns.

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I enjoy teaching at these conferences, and this was the most motivated and savvy group I’ve ever taught. I got through the introductory material in record time, and covered more material in more time than ever before. not that it’s a race, we want folks to absorb some of it. I was impressed at how well everyone kept up on their laptops, and at the quality of comments and questions they posed. I’m looking forward to doing this again, perhaps in the spring.

On a side note, the Office Sustained Engineering Blog reports that Office 2007 SP2 will be available “between February and April of 2009″. Among the items we can expect are:

• Improved functionality in Excel’s charting mechanism
• Enabling Object Model support for Charts in PowerPoint and Word

These are both good news. While teaching, I feel guilty at the frequency I have to say, “This doesn’t work in Excel 2007.” Also, a demo I’d prepared for today’s session, showing how to use ActiveX controls on a slide to interact with an embedded Excel chart, worked great in 2003 and failed in 2007, because the pasted Excel chart is inaccessible to VBA. The workaround, which I can usually find, is to insert the chart using Insert from File, which explicitly adds it to the slide as an OLE object; Excel 2003 and earlier pastes charts as OLE objects, but Excel 2007 pastes it as an “Office Chart”.

It’s mostly photography, not data visualization, but it’s still pretty cool.

Internet cartoon XKCD captures my views on fancy ringtones. Yes, I’m a Luddite too; my phone rings the old-fashioned way.

Speaking of Waterfalls, here are some nice wallpapers for your desktop: Waterfalls, Most Beautiful Waterfalls, and Waterfalls.

I’ve been awarded Microsoft MVP for Excel again, the eighth year in a row that I’ve received this honor.

Microsoft wants you to Give Us Feedback for Microsoft Office 2007. No, really. (Thanks for the link, Echo.)

Sept. 12, 1958: Kilby Chips In, Integrates Circuit (Wired Magazine). I didn’t see this link in time to include it with my last link dump. Last Friday was not only my father’s birthday, but also the 50th anniversary of the first successful demonstration of the integrated circuit, by Jack Kilby of TI, who eventually received the Nobel Prize for this development which has completely infiltrated modern life.

In Competing Tax Plans: Two Perspectives, Justin Wolfers compares different graphical representations of the McCain and Obama tax plans, and how the different approaches give greatly differing impressions of the effects of these plans. The article also links to the report by the Tax Policy Center, so you can carry out your own analyses.

This week the PTS Blog passed a milestone: Akismet Spam has now caught over 3000 spam comments.