According to Do You Know What Planned Parenthood Actually Does?, “the Susan G. Komen Foundation has announced they will stop funding Planned Parenthood for breast cancer exams and other...

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Microsoft introduced Sparklines as a native feature of Excel 2010. In a rare guest post, Sparklines For Excel vs. Excel 2010 Sparklines by Alex Kerin of Data Driven Consulting compared this new...

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Last week, in You Have 1 New Notification On Klout!, I used social media metrics site Klout to illustrate how choice of axis scales can exaggerate or wash out the variation in a data set. Today...

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You’ve exhausted the built-in and online help provided by Microsoft, and don’t have what you need. So where do you go to get help in Excel? There are a large number of resources available...

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Here’s a problem that I’ve heard people ask (and complain) about. They’ll have data in their workbook, neatly sorted from top to bottom. When they make a bar chart, the sorting is...

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Every so often I get an email with a subject line that’s something like “Jon, you have 1 new notification on Klout!” Wow, another social network thing, to go with all the other...

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Someone tweeted a link to a bad pie chart. I forget who it was: if it was you, let me know in the comments and I’ll give you credit here. But it’s not merely a bad pie chart, it’s...

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It is not difficult to build interactive charts in Excel that allow a user to selectively highlight a subset of the data for detailed examination. Excel’s semi-intuitive worksheet controls make...

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Last week in Series Lines: Useful or Chart Junk?, I wrote about Excel’s “Series Lines” feature, and how it seems like a good way to clarify the data in a stacked column chart, until...

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Stacked column charts in Excel offer a feature called “Series Lines”. These are lines between the stacks, connecting the tops and bottoms of corresponding blocks in adjacent stacks. At...

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Sales Funnel Graphs Sales funnel graphs are used to represent the development of sales leads into actual sales, or conversely the attrition of sales leads before they become actual sales. In the...

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Worst Pie Chart Ever? The other day I encountered a tweet with a common theme: “Worst Pie Chart Ever.” So I had to follow the link. It was an article in Atlantic Cities, 2011 Major League...

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If you’re looking for a tutorial on breaking an axis scale, you won’t find it here. Instead you’ll read why breaking an axis is a bad idea, and you’ll get a tutorial in Panel...

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