Chart Selection Guide

In Chart Rules, As Simple as Possible, But Not Any Simpler!, More Information per Pixel! (the blog of XLCubed, the BonaVista Systems – MicroCharts parent company) has posted some comprehensive chart type selection guidelines, to follow up the recent brouhaha over pie and bar charts. It’s not inappropriate to repurpose a quotation from Einstein, because it reminds us that a data presentation should be simplified to the extent possible, without oversimplifying all meaning out of it.

I am recreating a portion of the XLCubed guidelines here, which shows for a given class of relationship between variables, which chart type you should use.

If you want to follow up on the recent posts, here is a roughly chronological list of posts that I’ve followed:

• The three laws of great graphs, by Seth Grodin
• Seth’s Three Laws of Great Graphs, this blog
• Bar graphs vs. Pie charts, follow-up by Seth Grodin
• Bar graphs vs. Pie charts, follow-up on this blog
• Peltier Loves Pie, on Daily Dose of Excel
• Seth Godin on Great Graphs: A Very Light Purple Cow by Jorge Camoes of Charts
• Seth Godin on charts by Kaiser Fung of Junk Charts
• On Seth Godin on Charts, this blog
• Peltier Loves Pie, this blog
• Chart Rules, As Simple as Possible, But Not Any Simpler!, in More Information per Pixel!
• Peltier Goes Bar Hopping, this blog
• Godin Dumps on Bar Charts; Data Visualization Record Falls to 1 and 1, by Zach Gemignani, Juice Analytics