Jorge Camoes’ Charts

Excel is a great (but underrated) BI tool. Several BI vendors gave up fighting it and offer Excel add-ins as front-ends for their BI solutions. So, if you want to create a dashboard you should consider Excel, since it really offers better functionalities than many other applications for a fraction of the […]

Do you prefer the full report:

Or the executive summary?

For Tufte’s fans, Minard’s map plays a central role in Tufte’s iconography, and the way he praises it (”best statistical graphic ever”) is quoted endlessly (974 results in Google as of today, to be precise). Tufte discussed The Map in his first book (The Visual Display of […]

I know, I know, no one likes pie charts, but I can’t ignore them. A pie chart compares proportions but it is of limited use: either the data is too complex and a pie chart can’t handle it, or it is too simple and you should just use a table. So, the first […]

Funny story… I was playing with domain names today, trying to register names for future projects like “exceldashboards.com”. Unfortunately, this is already taken. And who owns it? Business Objects, the makers of Crystal Xcelsius (remember my Xcelsius dashboard series?). Type exceldashboards.com (I refuse to add a link) and you’ll be redirected to the xcelsius home […]

This is the second of 10 posts where I’m listing tips for better charts. Please take a look at the first post where the project is discussed. These are my chart formatting tips:

Use the right chart type for the data and the problem;
Apply sound design principles;
Use color strategically: mute axis and grid lines […]

This is the first in a series of 10 posts where I’ll suggest a (hopefully) coherent set of tips to improve our charts and, more important, to improve the way we make sense of the data. These are the planned posts:

General charting;
Formating;
Column/Bar charts;
Line charts;
Scatterplots (XY charts);
Pie charts;
Other chart formats;
Dynamic charts;
Dashboards;
Miscellaneous tips;
Bonus post: online resources.

These will […]

 Nathan, over the FlowingData blog, points to this video where John Tukey himself discusses the analysis of multivariate data using computers… in 1972. The library contains other great videos, so I encourage you to explore it.
Tukey had an enormous impact in the way we look at the data, but exactly who are “we”? Are “we” […]

I am writing Charts for three months now, and I’d like to share with you some stats, some thoughts, some expectations and plans for 2008.
First things first: thank you. Thanks for reading and commenting, thanks for linking, thanks for buying the dashboard. Thanks for sharing your time.
So, basic stats: 30 posts, 150 daily visitors, 200 […]

This is an Excel scatterplot. Each point is one of the 4200 Portuguese civil parishes. The green point shows the active parish and the red ones some parishes that may have a similar profile. Of course, if you select a different parish the red set also changes.
I like this idea of displaying geographic coordinates […]