Interesting Links for 3-April-2009
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2009.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
This is the first in a new weekly series of interesting links. Tune in every Friday morning for more.
Chart Galleries and Guidelines
Here are a few sites that provide charting guidance, and examples of how to and how not to make effective graphics.
Michael Friendly’s Gallery of Data Visualization – The Best and Worst of Statistical Graphics
Gary Klass’ Just Plain Data Analysis, which is actually the companion website to Gary’s book, Just Plain Data Analysis: Finding, Presenting, and Interpreting Social Science Data.
March Madness in April
This was more timely last week, but I’ll include it anyway. I’m not into the whole college hoops thing, I find basketball boring. But I liked Gilligan (Tim Wilson)’s improvement on ESPN’s Game Flow graph in Data Visualization – March Madness Style. Rather than tracing both teams’ scores from bottom left to top right, Tim plots score differential. This lends itself to a small multiples layout of the charts, which can be arranged by bracket, and a quick glance at a bunch of these can give you an idea of how teams progressed up the ladder and how many upsets occurred.
A Chinese Excel Blog
A colleague in China has started an Excel blog in his native language. Liu Wanxiang’s blog is Excel Pro Chart Blog. The focus is on charting and analysis using Excel. I can’t actually read the blog, but it has referred its readers to a number of my pages lately, so it must at least be pretty good! If anyone can vouch for the Excel Pro Chart Blog’s quality, please add a comment below.
Modern Retelling of Little Red Riding Hood
Tomas Nilsson has recreated the old fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood in this clever animation. I particularly enjoyed all the clever little infographics embedded within it.
Upcoming PTS Training Events
Second Excel Dashboard Boot Camp – May 2009: Join Mike Alexander and Jon Peltier in an intensive three-day training session covering advanced data and charting techniques for Excel dashboards.
Advanced Excel Conference, June 2009: Two days of Excel programming and charting on the Boardwalk with Bob Umlas and Jon Peltier.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Interesting Links for 24 April 2009
- Advanced Excel Learning Opportunities
- Second Excel Dashboard Boot Camp – May 2009
- Excel Dashboard and Visualization Bootcamp Two Weeks Away
- Advanced Excel Conference, June 2009
- Advanced Excel Conference – Three Weeks Away
- Two Weeks Until the Advanced Excel Conference
- Web Stats – June 2009
- Miscellaneous Notes for 11 June 2009
- Excel Dashboard and Visualization Boot Camp
Posted: Friday, April 3rd, 2009 under General.
Comments: 7
Comments
Comment from Matt Healy
Time: Friday, April 3, 2009, 5:15 am
Love the Little Red Riding Hood animation! I can also imagine doing a similar concept with Goldilocks in which nutritional data were used to illustrate “too big,” “too small,” and “just right” in scientific terms!
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Friday, April 3, 2009, 5:31 am
Matt – How about The Three Pigs, showing structural information about their building materials, plus comparisons of lung capacity of wolves, pigs, and other selected mammals.
Comment from Tony
Time: Friday, April 3, 2009, 7:50 am
Jon – I too am linked to and get a lot of traffic from the Excel Pro Chart blog. It’s a little frustrating that I can’t read a single word on the blog. I have gotten a few comments from the writer and I think it’s legit.
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Friday, April 3, 2009, 8:02 am
Tony – I think he’s cool; we’ve had a few email discussions. I tried using the Google translation service, and the result was a strange mix of technical and flowery text. I’m sure some technical and descriptive terms don’t make the jump reliably.
Comment from Marlena Compton
Time: Friday, April 3, 2009, 9:07 pm
Very timely. I’ve been looking for bad visualizations to include in a presentation this week so the link to Michael Friendly’s site is a great help.
Excuse me…I’m going to go watch that Little Red Riding Hood movie again.
Comment from yourightsite
Time: Thursday, April 9, 2009, 10:46 am
Excel Pro is the most popular Excel chart evangelist blog as far as myself as a Chinese reader knows, and recommended by quite a few bloggers.
Unfortunately I didn’t deep dive into it but I may bring up some proper translation of his declaration post.
Regards,
Comment from Elfii
Time: Sunday, April 12, 2009, 10:39 pm
A colleague in China has started an Excel blog in his native language. Liu Wanxiang’s blog is Excel Pro Chart Blog. The focus is on charting and analysis using Excel. I can’t actually read the blog, but it has referred its readers to a number of my pages lately, so it must at least be pretty good! If anyone can vouch for the Excel Pro Chart Blog’s quality, please add a comment below
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Mr Liu said, he is very glad to bring a lot readers to your blog.
comments about his blog? yes, it focused on what is the better way to present the data with the chart. and it use some easy way to show the best result.
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