It’s possible to do effective things in Xcelsius, but they make it very hard. I did a number of Xcelsius models for a client a while back. I did some cool prototypes in Excel, but they wanted them in PowerPoint and PDF, so I did the Xcelsius near-equivalents.

I ran into issues with Xcelsius’ incomplete treatment of Excel formulas. More important, most of my chart effects rely on combination charts, and these are just undoable in Xcelsuis. Waterfall charts are not possible, because you can’t make a chart series completely invisible (or at least you couldn’t at the time, and I’ve heard that Crystal curtailed all Xcelsius development when they bought it).

@Jorge – I think the answer is in the middle. Clean charts that tell a story should always be preferred over charts with background images and excessive bling. The power is when you can take a mixture of Tufte, Few and Cleveland instead of taking Tufte to the extreme. One chart I recently presented that had the most impact was a scatter plot.

@Jacques – You can only do so much and recommend what is the right/optimal choice. In the end, if they want a circle cut into triangles, they get a pie chart. Just like if your boss wants the chart with excessive chartjunk, then you have two options. Do it or quit. It’s hard to coach and steer management (especially executives) to certain chart designs unless they are very data centric. Also, Xcelsius can be used to create effective charts, you just need to do a lot of fine-tuning- See Datapig Technologies. Mike has a lot of tutorials.

On his blog, I asked Stephen Few “The question is why people fall for the bells and whistles? And why great visualization principles are not so self-evident that people would “fall” for them instead?”

His answer: “I’ve found that it’s easy to convince all reasonable people that the silly stuff doesn’t work by showing them examples of good and bad practices, demonstrating how things work, and taking the time to explain why. (…) Given a little instruction, everyone gets it. They might still feel tempted from time to time to gorge themselves on a pie chart or two, but they know they’ll regret in the morning.”

It’s hard to disagree, but I also appreciate the argument that pie charts, for example, have been around for so long, that everybody gets them, whereas we still need to explain bullet graphs since they are not really self-evident.

In my work, I have found, as Jorge puts so well that “a pure minimalist design will always be rejected by corporate culture”. Gee! I still have to create dashboards with Xcelsius 50% of the time…

Primary colors, pie charts, library paste. Unfortunately most people’s charting expertise has not advanced since second grade.

Some time ago I designed a sales dashboard that included a colorful bubble chart and other Excel defaults. The final bubble chart was much cleaner: gray circles (bubble area color set to none) and a color-coded “active” bubble. But the users wanted their colors back, and I had to explain why pointless color-coding would harm the display (and the task).

This example illustrates two things: a) a pure minimalist design will always be rejected by the corporate culture; b) it may be accepted if you are able to show its obvious advantages.

I feel that users are emotionally attached to (primary) colors, and that’s the first thing we must break. Once they become aware that the right color coding actually simplifies their work they may be willing to accept 2D charts and even scatterplots….

Excel charts are effective for displaying information when used properly. They can be created quickly, they are as accurate as the data, and, well, the flexibility depends on your creativity.

While they don’t need to be pretty, they also don’t need to be ugly. You could easily enough define a few custom chart types that you can apply in one or two clicks. I don’t use this feature: like a good engineer I tinkered with it until it broke. But I have one or two VBA routines that turn the ugly gray background to white and lighten the various lines. In fact, just doing that only takes a few seconds manually per chart.

Nielsen has a lot of good advice on usability, but I don’t think he’s strong on aesthetics. It is possible to combine usable and not-ugly in the same web site, presentation, or publication. Jorge said, “there is nothing wrong with using 3D effects, textures, and all the decoration in the world.” So use them, but just a little. A very little, because a small amount of decoration goes a long way. Just “don’t design technically incorrect charts”, and “don’t hide the patterns” (as Jorge also said).