I’ve just saw Bill Gates’ video. Impressive approach, and quite simple.No wonder why he’s such a visionaire…

A good story to tell…

You mean the Olympic Medal bar chart? The total series in on the primary axis and its gap width is 50%, the individual medals on the secondary, I’ve added the secondary category axis, and I’ve removed the secondary value axis.

as dumb as I may seem, I have to ask: how did you get to make that chart? I need to do something similar, and clearly have no idea on how to do so.

Would it be too much to ask you to share the file, or briefly tell me how to create the chart? I am using Excel 2003, with no add-ons.

Thanks !!

You can see it here: http://www.axiis.org/examples/HClusterColumnExample.html

I use Excel for the computation and the relative ease of programming. Its ubiquity doesn’t hurt, either. (My daughter works in sales and that’s how she keeps track of her contacts and her performance.)

When it comes to charting — “presenting”, “representing” or “visualizing” the data — I bump into two barriers. (1) Excel isn’t perfect and (2) my knowledge of what Excel can do is woefully incomplete. If I’m certain how I want to present the information and I can’t figure out how to twist-and-tweak-and-coax Excel to do it, then I resort to Google. If Google doesn’t find me a solution, then I politely beg my favorite Microsoft Excel MVP. :-)

The clincher for Excel, though, at least for me, is the connection of the chart back to the underlying data: change the data and the charts update.

Disclaimer (possibly of interest to Tom G). As an economics professor, my own data visualization needs are relatively straightforward: I am generally plotting curves in 2-space; frequently, these curves are step-functions. In some of my graphs, I like to have the region under a curve shaded. That’s about it for my visualization needs, so I am unlikely to commit the time to learn Axiis (just like Axum 6 several years ago).

The next “level” for me is to exploit Excel’s connection between data and charts to make the charts interactive and respond to user (i.e., student) entries, whether the entries are typed in cells or generated by spin-button clicks.

Recently, however, I have refereed journal submissions of empirical papers. My discipline is horrible on interpreting empirical results. There are generally paragraphs upon boring paragraphs devoted to highlighting a selection of the numerical results in one or more tables. The referee report I submitted last week encouraged the authors to use a simple column or [horizontal] bar chart to highlight their number-crunching results. I am probably a sandbag-against-the-tide in my request for “results visualization,” but I can hope. This didn’t figure in my referee report, but encoding two types of information would be straightforward: let the bar height or length represent the value of the estimated coefficient (positive or negative) and use color (or merely dark and light shades of gray) to encode the presence or absence of statistical significance.

My additional two cents’ worth…