Comments on: Stacked Bar Chart Alternatives

By: How to Visualize Survey Results using Incell Panel Charts [case study] | Chandoo.org - Learn Microsoft Excel Online

Fri, 28 May 2010 08:59:51 +0000

[...] Peltier has done beautiful analysis of this chart and presented various alternatives in his post yesterday. One of his recommendations is, of course, making a panel chart like [...]

By: Visualizing survey responses « Pushin data like weight

Visualizing survey responses « Pushin data like weight — Mon, 03 May 2010 02:12:39 +0000

[...] Visualizing survey responses May 3, 2010 by pompadourofdataviz Often surveys contain questions involving a Likert scale or rating scale (strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree) . Visualizing this type of data can be problematic because there are many different ways of grouping and analyzing responses. A common approach to dealing with this issue it to collapse the results into two groups, e.g. strongly agree or agree v. disagree or strongly disagree. Another approach is to present the results in the form of a stacked bar chart. Both of these approaches have limitations. Grouping the data results in the loss of potentially valuable information, e.g. one may want to know which question had the most respondents that strongly agreed. The stacked bar chart, while valuable for comparing cumulative values, makes comparison of the individual components difficult. [...]

By: DBM Café » Link tip: Peltier Tech Blog

DBM Café » Link tip: Peltier Tech Blog — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 04:12:45 +0000

[...] post Stacked Bar Chart Alternatives geeft de worsteling van het vinden van de juiste visualisatie mooi weer: Hij probeert een [...]

By: Naomi B. Robbins

Naomi B. Robbins — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:19:36 +0000

While we’re complaining about creating these plots in Excel, I’ll mention that I just posted how easy they are to draw in R on the dot plot post. To get another similar plot, I’ll just edit the code I used before (or someone else’s code).

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:11:29 +0000

Jeff -

The problem with using John’s routine to resize your charts is that it resizes the outermost shape that contains the chart. The inner plotting rectangle can only be resized indirectly, because Excel reserves space around it for axis tick marks and labels. I’ve used indirect routines to reshape the inner charting rectangle, but any small change seems to knock it out of kilter; changes like font name and size, axis scale limits, and whether you’ve visited print setup recently. This is why I try to do as much as possible in a single Excel chart, that is, in a panel chart.

By: Jeff Weir

Jeff Weir — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 21:15:03 +0000

Stephen…have you also seen Naiomi’s post at http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/some-comments-on-dot-plots-guest-post/ on dot plots?

Note that the chart I posted above in the comments was done in Excel, and I agree this was a rather painstaking way to create such a chart in terms of aligning the charts to the labels underneath (the labels and grey stripes are in spreadsheet cells, not actually chart elements).

John Walkenbach’s utilities package could have probably saved me some time here… see http://spreadsheetpage.com/index.php/pupv7/utilities#3. There’s a resize charts function that makes it easy to make a chart an exact size, or make all charts the same size; and an Object Align, Size & Space option that provides an easy way to precisely align, size, and space a group of objects or embedded charts (although for some reason I couldn’t get this to work in this particular worksheet. I’ll have another go)

However, without using this addin, I used a few shortcuts: after I got the first chart right, I just copied it, and pasted it where I wanted the 2nd chart, and changed where the series point. After I got the first row right (i.e. the top 5 charts) I just copied the rows where these charts sat, and pasted below the first row multiple times.

While this saved some time, it was still pretty fiddley.

But the chart I posted in the comments over at http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/some-comments-on-dot-plots-guest-post/ used formulas to do the charting, rather than chart objects themselves (although I used smiley faces instead of dots as a joke.)

There’s some screenshots and a link to a download there.

Regardless how fiddley it sometimes is to create non-standard charts, you can usually easily amend something you’ve done previously rather than create the whole thing from scratch. Or you can often find and download someone’s how-to guide (or even better, a working spreadsheet template) off the net.