Comments on: What’s Worse Than A Pie Chart?

By: Vishal

Vishal — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 04:41:40 +0000

Thanks a lot.
Depending on the message to be given, in the bar chart, I may put “Others” in a single bar and split that bar by cluster. Helps when individual data is too small to be noticed otherwise and also the other bars are scaled appropriately.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:10:30 +0000

Jeff – You’re barking up the wrong tree.

By: jeff weir

jeff weir — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:15:33 +0000

Jon: My cat ate my mouse, so I couldn’t vote in the original poll. Can you amend the above graphs accordingly.

By: John Walkenbach

John Walkenbach — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:06:21 +0000

Thanks for setting me straight, Naomi. I didn’t realize the histograms don’t have gaps between the columns. I did a Google image search for ‘histogram’ and just about every example had no gaps. The exceptions are the histograms generated by the Analysis Toolpak add-in.

I’ll fix those histograms in the 2007 editions. For now, I’ll just blame my tech editor for not catching it. :)

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:37:58 +0000

From “The Grammar of Graphics”, earlier in the same paragraph that Naomi cites:

This book shuns chart typologies.

Wow, that’s good. I’ll have to get a copy.

By: Naomi B. Robbins

Naomi B. Robbins — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:10:12 +0000

To quote Leland Wilkinson in The Grammar of Graphics (page 2) “A histogram is not a bar chart.” To start, a bar chart has a categorical horizontal axis while a histogram has a binned quantitative axis. Therefore, there should be no spaces between the bars. I have never seen a pseudo- third dimension in a histogram other than in Excel Charts. I’ll send more details in an email after I meet some deadlines. If you are in a hurry I suggest looking at the Grammar of Graphics.

By: John Walkenbach

John Walkenbach — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:37:33 +0000

My plan worked! When I created that chart, I knew it was not the best way to present the data, but I did it anyway. I was actually hoping that it would get some attention from the PTS Blog.

If I were presenting this data for a serious audience, I would have used a bar chart.

Naomi… if you have some time, please send me an email with your thoughts on histograms. I’m revising the books right now and this is a good time make changes.

By: Naomi B. Robbins

Naomi B. Robbins — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:22:09 +0000

Good points, Jon. I highly recommend John Walkenbach’s book but dislike his treatment of histograms.