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!

• The chart title doesn’t  provide us with much information about the chart.  I thought you where suppose to use titles that gave some insight into what the chart is telling us?
• I don’t get what the bars show, for pareto I don’t care about the count of each X category, I just want to know the %, of X to Y, right?
• Over all I don’t get what the chart is telling me. The 80% line is crossed at “Dashboards” or “100 Excel Tips”, which get about 5k’s each – but what’s that got to do with pareto?

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?

In Golf Charts Dick K posted some examples of charts he’d knocked up for his golf league, then in Golf Charts – Another Take, Tushar Mehta posted his take on the charts. In What would you do if a co-worker makes ugly charts? Chandoo asks the question, so I guess my answer is I’d do a blog post about them and try and do a better job [although I'd also guess I’ll fail and Jon P or Chandoo, will have to do it properly ;-)]
Tushars’ charts look OK, but Dicks’, (and there just no nice way to say this Dick, sorry) looks horrid, but also I think I have a few ideas that might be better at a showing the data. Of course they might not!!!!

Here we go.

Chart 1, Position Each Week.
Tushars’ step chart is a good way to show the data, in fact I think it’s probably the best way. I might have just bunged in a bar chart though, I think it works OK when there’s not many data points. I’d be tempted to also change the Y axis so that it was as long as the total number of positions in the league, that’s a bit more absolute.

Chart 2. Best and Worst.
Again Tushars’ chart is an improvement on Dicks’, but maybe the Y axis could be reversed? I like the idea on the range, but an average would be useful, and how about a standard deviation; – a average without a deviation is like a King with out a crown! Showing the date (week number) is easy too. I also sorted the data by lowest score, that’s just good practice I think?

Having made this chart, I can’t say I love it. I’d like to scale up the error bars for the SD, but that would mean their size would not be proportionate to the Y axis scale. Adding a second Y axis would be rubbish too. I’m not sure this is a win, hummmm.

Chart 3. Over Par, Over Handicap.
Dicks’ chart’ actually not that bad, I think it shows the data well, but Tushar brings up a very good point about positives. The issues with Tushars chart is that because the starting point is not the same its hard to get a handle on the over all performance of each player, which you can do in Dicks. I tried a load of combinations for this, but in the end settled on something simple. I think it works ok, maybe the colours could be better, but there’s quite a lot of information in this chart.

There is a bit of a problem here though and that’s with the actual data. If you play off 20, and drop 2 shots, thats not really as bad as if you play off 5 and drop 2 shots. A percentage I hear you say? Maybe…

I lost a bit of interest in the rest of the charts, but then the last one spiked it a bit.

Chart X.X
This is simple, show the average an total scores. But when I looked at both Tushar’s and Dick’s charts 2 things struck me. Firstly the bars are meaning less, they show who has the best scores, but there is not reason they should be as long or a short as they are. Especially for first one the resolution could be higher.  Second thing was that I could not compare all the data at the same time, the 2 sets of bars next to each other are too much (admittedly this might just be because I’m limited!)

I was not sure how to make this better, I thought about a panel chart, but I couldn’t see how that would plan out. In the end I went for a bit of in cell charting, but in the end again, I had to use a real charts because in cells charts could not give me the resolution I needed. I never solved the second issue!

On reflection, I don’t think I’ve brought much to the party, all my charts are bar charts(!), and one looks a bit like a box plot. I think I’ve got some way to go with charting!