Jorge Camoes’ Charts

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Always ask yourself: “what can I remove from this chart”? Remove Excel defaults, remove grid lines, make the chart smaller, use soft colors, remove irrelevant labels, remove the legend (by directly labeling series), remove series that you don’t really need, remove frames, remove decimal places, remove visual fluff.
Then ask yourself: “what can I add to […]

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 […]

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 […]