Just a quick one.
I notice that I often apply a fade effect to the bars of my bar charts, to me it looks a bit nicer.
With fade…
Without fade…
Its not too important, I think the options are:
1. Fade is best
2. Solid is best
3. Ross, you wasting my dam time, you’re a moron!
What do you think?
Following the recent excitement around Sparklines, it would have been easy to miss a little update to the excellent Sparklines for Excel add in.
Fabrice has updated the way Paretos can be handled, and the result look great, why not take a look for yourself here:
I’ve just upgraded to the latest and greatest Ubuntu release, and I thought I’d take a look at what the various spread sheets install with it can do. I’ve got 3 on my system;Â KSpread, oOO, and Gnumeric , although I think I may have installed Gnumeric myself. Any way here are some screen shots!
First up, Kspread, wow does this suck! It’s almost impossible to format the chart!
Next, Gnumeric, which was much better, but still rubbish if I’m honest (I’m actually a big fan of Gnumeric, I think it has some really useful features).
And finally, oOO, easily the best of the bunch, and the only one you could even mention in the same breath as Office, but it’s still absolutely MILES behind!
So there you go, if you want to do charting stay well clear of open source spread sheets! Or have I been unfair, I’m not a skilled user of these products, am I showing that in this analysis?
Also if you know of any killer graphic (charting) apps, let us know by posting a comment. And I dont mean Tableau, or map grinder or we are human (or what ever it’s called), actual charts, that my boss stands an chance of understanding!
Mike Alexander said something interesting the other day and I thought I should let everyone know! Mike was taking about bullet graphs, not only how to make them in Excel, but actually about the really important thing, which is weather or not they’re any good! I’ve never used them in anger myself, but I have always liked the idea, and thought that they looked kinda nice – much neater and more logical then the dreaded Speedo gauge!
Mike suggested that because they showed so much data, senior managers find them hard to understand and you need to spend time explaining the chart – which is never ideal!
This surprised me as they are really quite simple little charts, but then I remembered how stupid, different intelligent, most senior managers are and I thought how plausible it actually would be. Anyway, I had a little think and here my suggestions to make them easier to read – I have no way of knowing if it will work, but it’s just a thought!
What do you think, would that make any difference?
As a bonus here’s a list of links to bullet chart stuff, to make these charts I used Mike’s Video, and it was super easy, good work Mike!
Steven Few original spec for this type of chat.
A nice post with some examples of more complext versions over at clearly and simply
PHD Pareto Analysis – agian
1 October 2009 by Ross McLean
In PDH Pareto Analysis, Chandoo [Congrulations mate;-)))], shares with us a chart showing some pareto charting he was doing. This interested me because I didn’t get the chart. I’d like to open this up for debate, and hopefully learn something.
Here Chandoo’s Chart:
Here are my thoughts on Chandoo’s chart – there probanly wrong!
Here’s how I show pareto relationships, which address the issues above
I often use pareto for analysis stock profiles etc., where there are 1000’s of items, and these are 3 things I really want to know:
1. Does this profile conform to 80/20 rule?
2. If not, what’s 80% of the X by Y.
3. How long is the 20% tail?
In practice I often add the lines, but don’t normally add the text, I think it’s clear what the lines are showing. I’m not so worried about the data in Chandoos chart, because it’s a bit misleading anyway (only 10 pages?), but what I hope my chart shows better is the 2 important data point 20% of X and 80% of Y and also how the tail looks.
Now that’s just my take on it and I’m almost certainly wrong! What’s your view?
Tags: Charts, Comment
Categories: Charting • 7 Comments »