Tutorials

A couple of weeks ago, I started making the graphs in the Financial Times’ Visual Vocabulary in Microsoft Excel. Based on the Graphic Continuum work I’ve done with Severino Ribecca, the FT’s Visual Vocabulary contains about 70 graphs with a…

My affinity for tile grid maps is well documented. I think there a nice alternative to the standard choropleth map and even though they introduce their own geographic distortions (such as South Carolina placed to the east of North Carolina),…

In June, Stefanie Posavec and I teamed up to offer two data visualization workshops, one in DC and another in Chicago. We had so much fun, and the feedback so positive, that we’ve decided to hold another round of workshops! If…

If you’re currently using Excel 2016, you know that the Waterfall chart is now a default chart type. You can select your data and insert the chart as any other line, bar, or area chart. One problem I’ve found, however,…

Communicating uncertainty is a difficult task. Many readers don’t fully appreciate or understand uncertainty, what it means, and where it comes from. A similar case can be made for visualizing distributions. I’ve heard many complaints about the good ol’ box-and-whisker…

A few weeks ago, I published an Excel tutorial on how to create the ill-named “box-and-whisker-and-scatterplot chart.” In response, Len Kiefer pointed me to a post on Maarten Lambrecht’s cool new project Xenographics that was essentially the same chart type, just…

This graph popped up in my Twitter feed a few weeks ago. I have no idea what I’d call it—a box-and-whisker-and-scatterplot chart? I’m also not sure whether it’s better than a violin chart, which shows the entire distribution, but it’s…

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…