Tutorials

Back in January, Nathan Yau at Flowing Data published an interactive set of waffle charts that allows you to explore selected demographics of people in the U.S. The user can select across three demographic characteristics—gender (Male, Female); age group (18-24,…

One of the more fun parts of my data visualization workshops is where I give people Post-It Notes and Sharpie markers, show them two numbers, and ask them to draw as many graphs as they can. Quantity, not quality, I…

When I teach data visualization in Excel, I always show Excel’s Data Import tool. This is a really powerful tool because it allows you to quickly and easily read in data from a variety of sources such as CSV files,…

The ONE Campaign published a Tile Grid Map of Africa a couple of weeks ago in their new feature on how the internet can help end extreme poverty. The map is really interesting because it combines a Tile Grid Map…

I saw this calendar heatmap of bike rides at Via Velox a few weeks ago. It’s not a really new approach to visualizing daily data–Nathan Yau at Flowing Data created something similar a few years ago using vehicle fatalities. What I…

A couple of weeks ago, Jeffrey Shaffer at Data+Science wrote an interesting post about how to visualize categorical data when the scales of the values being compared are very different. As an example, he explored visualizing stock prices, which can…

In May, I published an ebook A Guide to Advanced Data Visualization in Excel 2010 that walks you through how to create more than 15 advanced chart types in Excel step by step. Today, I’m happy to release the Excel…

I recently published a paper on the share of people who receive benefits through the Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) program for reasons of mental disorders, such as mood disorders and schizophrenia. This group of DI beneficiaries now constitutes the…

Last week, Justin Wolfers from the University of Michigan posted a tile grid map to Twitter. Because he tagged me in the tweet, I thought he had used my Excel template. Instead, he built a script in Stata that creates a…

Bump Charts may not be the most common type of chart, but they are useful for plotting changes in rank. Consider, for example, political polling or winning percentage in sports; it’s the rank that’s particularly important, not the actual percentage….