The Whatever Files, 15 May 2009
by Jon Peltier
Friday, May 15th, 2009
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2010.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Greenhouse Gas Spinning Wheels
In Spinning multi-color, Kaiser of JunkCharts brings to our attention a worthwhile study of greenhouse gases, and a decidedly not worthwhile visualization of the same. It’s very colorful, but not easy to interpret. In fact, the colors are distracting, and it takes some poring over the graphic to realize that the smaller pie charts represent unequal portions of the larger one.
Image created by Robert A. Rohde / Global Warming Art.
Kaiser provides a nice analysis of this ineffective visualization, and creates an alternative bar chart. Please visit his post to see what he has to say.
2009 XLCubed Dashboard Competition
XLCubed and BonaVista Systems, makers of MicroCharts sparkline software for Excel and the new Chart Tamer add-in for Excel, announce the 2009 Excel Dashboard Competition.
Like last year, they are soliciting entries from real business applications, produced using only Excel and their own Excel add-in products. This is a good opportunity to sharpen your dashboard skills, and if you don’t have the BonaVista add-ins, it’s a good time to download the 30-day trial versions.
Every Picture Tells a Story, Don’t It?
Chandoo reminds us that A Good Chart is a Story with this graphic showing that incidence of obesity increases as the time spent eating decreases.
Obesity and the Fastness of Food
Part of the fun is in the interpretation. Is this actual time spent eating, or reported time spent eating? Does it include time spent on the couch drinking beer and eating chips? Or maybe fast food really is bad for you.
Misinterpretation is fun, too. Eat more and weigh less. In my dreams.
Chando makes a good point: A good chart tells a story, and if you have no story, maybe you should spare us and keep the chart to yourself. Although that didn’t stop Dilbert in the cartoon I posted on Pi Day:
Dilbert comic strip for 03/07/2009 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.
Testing for Bugs at xkcd
xkcd comic strip for 05/13/2009.
I’ll never read the disposition of a bug report the same way again.
Excel Dashboard and Visualization Bootcamp
Next week is the Bootcamp in Texas. I’ll probably be posting lightly.
Related Posts:
- Pie Chart for Pi Day
- Upcoming Excel Training Sessions
- Decline (XKCD)
- In-Cell Bullet Charts
- Web Stats – June 2009
- Map Bubble Chart of Store Closings
- Which Pie is Better?
- New Feature: The Chart Doctor
- Dashboards
- Nice Dashboard Examples
Posted: Friday, May 15th, 2009 under General.
Comments: 3
Comments
Comment from BCC
Time: Friday, May 15, 2009, 8:48 am
That’s a shame; Global Warming Art’s visualizations are generally pretty good (e.g. http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr_Rev_png)
Comment from Andy Holaday
Time: Friday, May 15, 2009, 7:21 pm
How about this for the greenhouse gas chart? It takes into consideration the weight of the three gasses (as stated in the bottom section of the original chart).
The total height of each stack faithfully reflects the contribution of each sector but I opted not to place values on the horizontal axis since each gas is measured on a different scale according to its weight among all gasses.
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Friday, May 15, 2009, 9:32 pm
Beats a bunch of pies. The most accurate way to compare the gases would be not by weight but on the relative effect of a unit of each on the greenhouse effect.
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