Jorge Camoes’ Charts

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ll be writing for Bonavista Systems‘ new company blog, More Information per Pixel.
As you may know, Bonavista is the maker of MicroCharts, the best implementation of Edward Tufte’s sparklines for Excel. Their parent company, XLCubed, offers analysis, reporting and dashboard solutions that extends the power of Excel much beyond […]

More data = better decisions, right? Not always. When you are getting more information than you can process within a specific time period information overload starts creeping. Confusion, stress, anxiety and low motivation usually follow. Can we prevent that?
In general, the more information you have, the more accurate your decisions will be. But at some […]

Do you need VBA to create an Excel dashboard? Should you take the plunge and go beyond Excel formulas? Well, I think you should, but feel free to disagree. Charley Kyd, commenting on my review of his e-book, disagrees:
As a consultant, I visited too many clients where an Excel user had written some macros, used […]

This is the time for scatter plots in the 10 x 10 charting tips series:

A scatter plot is square by definition (I forget that sometimes…);
In some cases, it makes more sense to use a scatter plot than two column charts: for example, instead of having a column chart to display product market […]

These are 10 basic tips for column and bar chart design:

A column chart is not a skyline: if you can’t see the individual patterns, consider removing some series or create several smaller charts;
If you are charting categorical data sort the columns; if there is more than one series, allow the user to sort the data […]

The other day I was reading Dundas’ whitepaper “Best Practices for Building Digital Dashboards” (PDF) and you know what? What they say makes a lot of sense. I agree with at least 75% of what is written. For example:
… developers must be careful that the visuals do not interfere with the usability and efficiency of […]

Jon Peltier’s site is usually my first stop when I want to find a solution for an Excel chart problem. His site is one of the best resources for add-ins, tips, tricks and “impossible charts”. Now he’s sharing his expertise with us in his new blog. So if you want to go beyond basic […]

Following the 10 x 10 post series on tips for better charts, these are the 10 tips for line charts:

Don’t use line markers unless you really need them to identify b&w printed charts;
Don’t use a legend; directly label the series, instead;
If you can’t easily see the pattern of each series you may have too […]

How do you create a map like the one above for your next presentation if you don’t have a mapping tool? Simple, create it in Excel. Easier said than done, right? Well, not really…
Following the “geo-scatterplot”, in this screencast tutorial I’ll show you how to create a thematic map and color-code it, based on your […]

If you google for “Excel dashboards”, 6 out of the first 10 results link to Charley Kyd’s ExcelUser website or some of his affiliates. MrExcel calls Charley Kyd “the king of Excel dashboards”.
There is a good reason for that. Three years ago, Charley Kyd published an e-book, Dashboard Reporting with Excel, probably one of the […]