data visualization | Excel & VBA

Treemap in Excel – Coming Soon

Its been a few days since I posted. In case you were wondering what I was up to - yours truly was busy coding a program to create treemaps in Excel. Treemaps are interesting creatures. You can pack a few thousand data points in a single treemap and utilize just about the same space as any of the traditional charts. The term 'treemap', as we see it being used nowadays, actually refers to the inward ...

Chart Table – When Chart meets Table

Posted on 15 September 2009

Chart table - as the name suggests - is a beautiful fusion of a chart and a table giving rise to a visually appealing yet information rich presentation of data. Not that the concept itself is anything new - experts have openly and vociferously championed the cause of the chart table, its various facets have been discussed at length in numerous forums and the latest versions of excel come equipped with tools that further aid their creation (namely sparklines). However ...

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How to Choose a Chart

Posted on 03 July 2009

How to choose a chart? Which chart would best fit the data set that I have? How do I choose the better chart type from Excel? Finding the right type of chart for the data set that you have can be a bit of a challenge. Given a set of seemingly equivalent alternatives, picking one chart over the other can turn out to be quite an interesting exercise.The chart chooser diagram can help you make a choice in situations ...

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Chartjunk

Posted on 29 June 2009

Chartjunk, a term first coined by Edward Tufte, refers to all those elements in a chart that add no further value. Chartjunk comes in many shapes and size - redundant labels, unnecessary gridlines, over-the-top use of colors and everything that a 'creative' mind can think of. However what should be kept in mind is that this term also has a strong contextual meaning. An element that may appear as chartjunk in one graph may serve a useful function in another ...

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Where did my money go ?

Posted on 11 June 2009

Flowing data had this posted a few months back showing various infographics which chart out the financial crisis and the events related to it. There even an interesting clip that you can watch.Interestingly the article also carries the impressive NY Times graphic on how this bear market compares to ...

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Make Charts in Excel Using Symbols

Posted on 21 May 2009

You can use Excel to make charts using symbols and display unconventional characters. Here's a list of symbols that can be used for making charts in excel. You can generate these symbols in Excel by formatting normal alpha-numeric characters with in-built or custom fonts (Windings, MS Outlook etc.)Few quick tips:To make a bar graph Use the REPT(char) function in Excel to repeat a character. Choose from the list of symbols ...

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Stress Test Results – A Classic Visualization Challange

Posted on 08 May 2009

The results of the "Stress Test - Housing Crisis of Shame" are out. I just saw NY Times publish the stress test figures this morning. The first thing that came to my mind when I saw the results was, well.......not that they require another $75 billion, that's pretty well known to most of us by now, was ....gosh.....what an opportunity wasted. Here was a important and relevant piece of data that could have really been presented better using ...

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