Tutorials

How many times have you heard someone rail against the use of maps in data visualization? The areas are not scaled to the data; geography distorts the patterns; you can’t accurately discern the quantities…. And yet, people love maps. They…

You probably know that I’m a big fan of slope charts. And dot plots. Big fan. Love them both. But neither are default chart types in Excel, which, believe it or not, is still the primary data visualization tool for…

Marimekko charts encode two variables: one along the height of the vertical axis and another using the width of the bars or columns. This one from The Economist, for example, has GDP per capita ($) on the vertical axis and…

In Chapter 5 of Cole Nussbaumer’s new book, Storytelling with Data, she shows a revised version of a stacked column chart that highlights three segments with labels off to the left and two summary numbers to the right. It looks…

I was asked recently if it is possible to make this graph in Excel. It’s just a simple line chart with the data labels placed on the point instead of above or below, as is the usual case. I generally…

Last week, I showed you how to use Excel’s Conditional Formatting menu to add cell formats to highlight specific data values. Here, I’ll show you how to easily use the Color Scales options in that menu to create a Heatmap….

Last week, I wrote about how to make a slope chart in Excel when the data series are in different units. Today, I’ll use those same data to show you how to use Excel’s Conditional Formatting menu to highlight your data….

I was recently asked to create a series of Excel graph options for what I’d consider a relatively small dataset (but sometimes the small datasets are the hardest to visualize!). The data consisted of a measure of life expectancy and…

I was at a conference earlier this fall and someone asked me whether it’s possible to create an Excel chart where only the first (top) y-axis label has a percentage sign format while the others were just number labels. In…

My friend Stephanie Evergreen–who co-hosts the awesome Rad Presenters Podcast with me–published a post last week about labeling charts in Excel. In it, she offered some guidance about how to get rid of your default legends and directly label your charts…