Comments on: Magazine Quality Chart (Economist)

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:51:32 +0000

Steve -

I have no knowledge of what graphics package The Economist uses for its charts, but I am positive they don’t use Excel. I would assume they use Illustrator. This article shows how to make such a chart using Excel.

By: Steven Matthews

Steven Matthews — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:41:54 +0000

Are you sure The Economist uses Excel to make its charts? I am a graphic production artist and have worked at a number of financial institutions and publications, and we’ve always used Adobe Illustrator for final output. These institutions have unwavering standards regarding their output — font size/leading, placement, colors, etc.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:06:34 +0000

Chrisham – To identify a font, I think you have to already have a good idea what it is. At least narrow it down by style.

By: chrisham

chrisham — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:00:31 +0000

Wow! Thanks Jon…. Your tutorials are a fantastic read.
The chart looks great and from another tutorial you have pointed me to great utility in selecting colors : http://colorbrewer2.org/
The right selection of Color and font make a great impact in making a good dashboard or reports as you would well know.
My question is, are anyways to recognize a particular font I may see on a chart (normally something I would view online through some JPG or GIF files).

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 11:26:35 +0000

Paul -

There are two ways to handle this. One is to keep the series with lines as is, without the marker on the last point, and a one-point XY series that always indexes to the last X and Y values in the data, and this series has the custom marker. The other is to sort the data in reverse order, so the data is listed newest to oldest in the worksheet. This way the first point of the series is always the latest, and if you add the marker to this point, it will always be on the last point.

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:08:51 +0000

I see how you’ve created the custom data markers, I have a line graph i have one custom marker on the end, when i add data to it, the line extends but the marker doesnt move to the new end point, can you advise if this is possible?

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:06:43 +0000

Mike -

None of my readers ask dumb questions. What you have to do is format the X axis scale, and check the “Value (Y) axis crosses at maximum” box.

By: mike

mike — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:35:03 +0000

Dumb question, sorry, but how do you get the Y labels from the left-hand side to the right-hand?

By: Matt H

Matt H — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:04:04 +0000

Yes, printing to PDF has become my preferred way to get high-resolution output from Excel — I use GhostScript myself. For viewing and for converting to bitmaps I use the free Acrobat Viewer from Adobe — recent versions have a “Snapshot tool” that allows selecting a rectangular region copy to the clipboard as a bitmap at the currently displayed resolution. By adjusting the zoom setting before capturing the image, I can easily get a bitmap at whatever resolution I want.

Also, when pasting directly from Excel into PowerPoint or similar programs, under Paste special select “Picture (Enhanced metafile)” and you get a scalable vector image without all the overhead of an embedded Excel object.

I frequently combined Excel, PowerPoint, Ghostscript, and Acrobat Viewer in this manner: make the charts in Excel, copy and paste into PowerPoint as Enhanced metafile pictures, further tweak in PowerPoint, print to PDF using the Ghostscript driver, then finally convert to bitmaps at the needed resolution with Acrobat Viewer. All tools except Excel and PPT for these steps are free.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:32:41 +0000

Rob - I made charts for a client who was putting them into glossy four color brochures. I was skeptical that the resolution of an Excel chart would be adequate without major work in something like Illustrator. I tried printing the workbook as a PDF file, and the PDF driver converted the charts into EPS objects which had 300+ dpi resolution, and the output was much nicer than I could have imagined. Excel 2003 only provides limited options for such things as line thickness, but presumably Excel 2007 would improve on this. I was not using any fancy PDF software. I used PrimoPDF and PDF Creator, both of which are capable freeware programs.