excel

It almost goes without saying, but tables are a way to visualize data. Tables of regression results are a common type of table researchers create. But they can be frustrating to create well—point estimates, standard errors, asterisks, variable names, column…

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…

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…

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,…

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,…