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Chart Design: Abortion Ratios 1980-2003
Source: U.S. Census Bureau (original Excel file). The abortion ratio is defined by the number of abortions per 1,000 abortions and live births. (Click to enlarge) Notes: 1. We know that information...
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How to Make Better Pie Charts with On-Demand Details
This article goes much against conventional wisdom about pie charts (and doughnut charts) by answering these two simple questions: Can we use a large number of categories in pie charts? (Yes, we can.)...
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Charts: Monthly Unemployment Rates by State 1976-2009
Here are two ways to display a relatively large dataset, montly unemployment rates by state since 1976. The first one, above, is perfect to see the overall patterns, the range from the lowest to the...
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Beautiful But Terrible Population Pyramids
These are the population pyramids (and half-pyramids…) of some more or less randomly selected countries. Each series displays population by age group (both sexes) in a given year, from 1981 (darker...
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Beautiful but Terrible Pyramids: Tableau Edition
Well, here is my first chart in Tableau, finally! After publishing my experiments with population pyramids (using Excel), I thought I could try Tableau Public with the same dataset from the US Census...
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Strange L-shaped trends
There is not much of a story in the expected evolution of US population, according to the United Nations estimates and projections (1950-2100): (You’ll see in a moment why there is a vertical line in...
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Finally revealed: the optimal number of categories in a pie chart
It’s very simple, really: you do not compare proportions in a pie chart. Because a pie chart is not a comparison chart, it’s a part-to-whole chart. When you do this: what you really want to do is to...
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Making Excel maps without VBA
If you want to make a choropleth/thematic map in Excel without programming perhaps conditional formatting is all you need. Here is how to do it: Select a few hundred columns and rows; Set width and...
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Excel dashboard: Using Excel for catchment area analysis
I’m sure you’re familiar with the Walmart growth map. A basic visualization looks like this: Obviously this has a lot of potential for a more design-oriented approach, and there are many examples...
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Why I don’t like bar charts
Pies charts are fun to use, but it’s almost impossible for grown-ups to find a good reason for using them at work. So your first, safe-for-work choice is a bar chart. The boring bar chart. I don’t like...
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Infographics vs. Data Visualization
People keep asking what the difference is between data visualization and infographics. Since I’m not completely satisfied with the available answers I thought I could return to the subject and write my...
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Chart redraw: Troops Vs. Cost (Time Magazine)
This chart is very similar to the original, published this week in the Time magazine: I don’t like dual-axes charts. Actually, they don’t like themselves and they beg for a connected scatterplot, so...
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A classification of chart types
A few weeks ago, I needed a classification of chart types for my book, and reinventing the wheel was the last thing I wanted to do. I started with Andrew’s classification and the Juice Analytics...
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Easy way to make bullet charts and boxplots in Excel
I am sure I’m missing something here, but I don’t understand why making bullet charts and boxplots have to be so overly complex in Excel. Instead of messing around with bars and scales and secondary...
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For the Greek hairdressers, the party’s over
In the beginning of the Greek debt crisis, Greek hairdressers became one of the symbols of a badly managed country (they could retire at 50 with full benefits). But there is more and more interesting...
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Find the revolution
I have a challenge for you. The chart above displays the evolution of infant mortality rate in Portugal. The years in the x-axis are not labeled on purpose. In one of those years there was a left-wing...
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