Chandoos’ 6 Favorite Charts
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2009.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Chandoo offers a discussion of 6 charts you will see in hell.
He reintroduces us to some old favorites: the pie chart (actually the pie-of-pie chart, representing multiple pie charts), the donut chart (also representing, in a way, multiple pie charts), the radar chart, the 3D column chart, and more.
The ribbon chart (aka 3D line chart) has actually been “improved upon” in Excel 2007, as shown in PC Magazine’s review of Office 2007 Beta 2 and also described by Kaiser in Microsoft and Innovation:
I was amused to see this Gooooogle Ad at the bottom of Chandoo’s post:
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Posted: Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 under Chart Types.
Comments: 16
Comments
Comment from Chandoo
Time: Wednesday, September 3, 2008, 10:04 am
Just a correction.. they are not my favorites.. :D also, I dont get to control which google ads show up on my pages…
But I sincerely hope in future releases all the charting / spreadsheet tools actually eliminate these monstrous charts so that no body ever creates them… :D
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Wednesday, September 3, 2008, 10:24 am
Chandoo –
I was being tongue in cheek. In written communication, the smirk doesn’t always come through clearly. Note that I used the correct title of your post. It’s tempting to twist it though to say “burn in hell”.
I also sometimes get ironic Google ad choices on my pages, including the one I saw on your site, ads which offer products that go against charting best practices.
Comment from James Gibbons
Time: Wednesday, September 3, 2008, 1:01 pm
Nice to see the extended conditional formatting in Excel 2007, which allows the creation of simple “heat maps”.
Would be interested to see a simple solution for getting around the limited conditional formatting in Excel 2003 .
Chandoo – I’m looking forward to part III of your great KPI Dashboard series. Maybe creating product heamap could be an idea for part V ?
Be a shame for it to come to an end!
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Wednesday, September 3, 2008, 1:52 pm
James -
If the heat map is intelligently applied, it could be useful. The heat map in the example I used to show the ugly ribbon chart is as ugly as the ribbon chart. Part of the problem, of course, is that someone populated the chart and the data range with random numbers, so there are no patterns worth highlighting.
Comment from Maureen
Time: Wednesday, September 3, 2008, 3:05 pm
I would like to thank Mr. Peltier for his Excel charting web-site. It has been an extremely useful resource for me.
Comment from Chandoo
Time: Wednesday, September 3, 2008, 3:46 pm
@James … unfortunately heat map doesn’t figure in Robert’s ideas for dashboard. So you have to wait for that. Btw, the post 3 is up at http://chandoo.org/wp/2008/09/03/excel-kpi-dashboard-percentile-3/
As Jon says, if applied intelligently, heat maps are a good visualization tools. For example see the google search insights page, they have used heat maps to convey search volume, easy to make conclusions in a snap. But I guess excel must have crippled the heat map makers with weird choices… [http://www.google.com/insights/search]
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Wednesday, September 3, 2008, 4:57 pm
Chandoo -
I wouldn’t say Excel has crippled the makers of heat maps, but I will point out that Excel makes it easier sometimes to do the wrong thing graphically. Using more typical heat map data, and a less garish color scheme, would produce a serviceable heat map.
James -
In Excel 2003 you could use VBA conditional formatting to create more colors than the built-in three formats for conditional formatting. You would use an approach not unlike the VBA Chart Conditional Formatting examples on this blog:
VBA Conditional Formatting of Charts by Series Name
VBA Conditional Formatting of Charts by Value
VBA Conditional Formatting of Charts by Category Label
Comment from derek
Time: Thursday, September 4, 2008, 11:04 am
Chandoo, some of the monstrous chart types are components you can make interesting charts from, so I don’t want MS to take them away from me, unless they replace them with a good implementation of the chart types I’m making with the components.
A universal charting engine, like R but with a less steep learning curve, would be nice.
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Thursday, September 4, 2008, 12:24 pm
Derek -
I wouldn’t want to see some of these types go, either. It would be nice if they were de-emphasized, and if there were some kind of smart system for helping users select a chart type. Something like a mature version of Microsoft Lab’s Chart Advisor.
Comment from Robert
Time: Thursday, September 4, 2008, 3:16 pm
James,
with regards to your heat map request:
Actually there is already a post on Chandoo’s blog with a heat map in Excel 2003:
http://chandoo.org/wp/2008/08/12/olympic-medals-excel-chart-improved/
The idea and the vba-code have been taken from Tushar Mehta’s website:
http://www.tushar-mehta.com/excel/charts/0301-dashboard-conditional%20shape%20colors.htm
The map on Chandoo’s post is a world map, but you could easily replace the shapes of the countries by simple rectangles and apply Tushar’s idea to that as well.
Conditional formatting of cells is another option, but – as you mentioned – Excel 2003 is limited to 3 conditions, i.e. 4 colors and that is definitely not enough for a serious heat map. So you would have to use vba again to change the fill colors of the cells. I never did, but I think this shouldn’t be too difficult.
Comment from derek
Time: Thursday, September 4, 2008, 5:35 pm
A heat map table with well-selected colours would also be enhanced by sorting the rows and columns so that the colours make a diagonal pattern. Provided the values have the right pattern and are not just RAND() formulae.
I’ve described a method for doing this here.
Comment from Colin Banfield
Time: Thursday, September 4, 2008, 11:55 pm
Chandoo left out two “critical” charts from his favorites list – The cone and the cylinder. For the award of the most useless chart types ever created by mankind, these would at least be finalists.
Jon, ever tried this TreeMapper add-in for Excel? http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/3f3ed95e-26d8-4616-a06c-b609df29756f/Details.aspx
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Friday, September 5, 2008, 7:21 am
Colin -
The cone is especially bad: the conic shape of the data points de-emphasizes the higher values. But I consider Excel’s cones, pyramids, and cylinders to be merely the ugly inbred cousins of the 3D bar and column type charts.
I played with the treemapper a bit, but I really have no projects which have a need for that kind of visualization. Personally I don’t that that treemaps are as wonderful a visualization medium as the hype would indicate. And I think the concept is still not understood across the types of clients I have (scientists, enigneers, financiers, all smart people).
They can be useful, sure: I saw a nice example that broke down the contents and directory structure of a hard drive. But it’s based on areas, with both rectangle positions and colors applied semi-arbitrarily.
Comment from Colin Banfield
Time: Friday, September 5, 2008, 9:22 am
As Stephen indicates, the treemap is really intended for visualizing a huge amount of data in a very specific context. Definitely not your everyday tool.
Comment from James Gibbons
Time: Friday, September 5, 2008, 10:19 am
wow…. I was only away for two days, and now I have lots of links to look at.
In terms of heatmaps, I was think more of the tabular variety, as described by Perceptual Edge (rules for using color):
http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/visual_business_intelligence/rules_for_using_color.pdf
I find the version without the data the best!
Comment from Robert
Time: Saturday, September 6, 2008, 3:36 pm
James,
inspired by your request I implemented a tabluar heat map in Excel, similar to the one in Stephen Few’s article. I did it with Excel 2003, so a small vba-routine is necessary and you would have to enable macros when opening the file.
Unfortunately I do not have a website or blog of my own where I could post it for download. And I don’t want to bother Chandoo again…
So: if you are interested, send me an email to
trm001 (at) online (dot) de
and I will send you the file.
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