Tutorials

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….

As a reader of this blog, you probably know I use Microsoft Excel for a lot of my data visualization needs. Excel is easy to use, everyone has it, and it works well with most other programs. One of the…

The Eurosearch Song Contest, a new visualization from Maarten Lambrechts and the Google News Lab, examines what would happen if Google searches were used to award points in the Eurovision Song Contest. It’s a really cool piece that allows you…

Someone recently asked me how to create a legend for a heatmap in Excel. In R, adding a legend is part of the package (the image below from a thread on StackOverflow), so it’s pretty easy to do. Building a…

I saw this interesting post from Len Kiefer yesterday about creating a Pixel map of the U.S. using R (which he based off this blog post by Colin Fay). While tile grid maps and hexagon maps address some of the issues…