Category: Visualization

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic shares a couple recommendations:

When creating a graph to explain something to someone else, I recommend that you declutter and focus attention. These concepts are not new. We have taught and written about them—directly and indirectly—many times before. I wrote about them again when drafting my new book, but then decided to take a different approach. Rather than relinquish my original words to a dismal fate in my computer’s trash bin, I thought perhaps they might still be of use here. After all, even if we’ve shared good advice before, sometimes it bears repeating.

Those are great general principles and Cole has specific examples of the principles in action.

Amy Esselman re-designs a mess of a chart:

When faced with any unfamiliar but complicated graph, it can be helpful to think about it piece by piece to gain a better understanding of what’s being communicated. That way, we’ll have a better handle on how we can improve the overall visual. 

The goal of this chart is to allow managers to compare their store’s performance against its forecasted range and the actual performance of other stores in the region. 

Click through for the full process.

Steve Jones thinks about zero:

I’m not great at building charts and graphs. I can build a basic chart, but I often depend on the tooling I use to size, scale, etc. appropriately for whatever I’m graphing. That, or I just use a basic graph that starts from zero and has some sort of linear scale. Or I just present a table of numbers.

There are plenty of misleading charts, especially used by the media that want to show some particular aspect of data that suits the story they are reporting. Many of these misleading charts often don’t start at zero, and they end up scaling in a way that can confuse people.

Steve references a lengthy article on the topic, one which is definitely worth the read, especially because as far as I’m aware, most of the academic literature on visualization and starting at 0 ignores line charts. The only work I’m familiar with is Cleveland, McGill, and McGill, who recommended banking to 45 degrees (and here’s an example of it in SAS).

Elizabeth Ricks makes a point:

Today’s post is a tactical one: how to highlight a data point in Excel. 

When we craft visualizations for explanatory purposes—that is, when there’s a specific finding or recommendation that we want to communicate to someone specific—our goal is to drive action. In those cases,  our visuals should emphasize what’s interesting in the data and what requires attention. Highlighting key points in our graph is an important step in creating successful explanatory communications.

Read on for examples as well as how to do this.