Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Charts are everywhere in daily life; from news commentary, to stocks, to web polls, right down to entertaining sites like www.graphjam.com.
Who really knows which one to use? We all understand the old phrase, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” but which picture (or, in this case, which chart) gets me closer to that thousand instead of 3?
Today we are going to cover some basic chart types and what picture they draw. So, like Prometheus giving fire back to man, I now give the knowledge of Redmond back to the masses.
The four most commonly used chart types are Column, Bar, Line, and Pie. These are not the only chart types, but they cover what most mere mortals like you and I can probably get the most out of.
Let’s start with the column chart. The column chart is good for comparing values across multiple categories. For example: Who had the larger population; the Romans, the Greeks, or the Egyptians? It’s pretty straightforward. You have three categories (Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians), and their associated values (in this case, population numbers). This type of chart is also good if you plan on creating trend lines for forecasting, and no — the trend lines are not the same as getting your fortune told by the Oracle of Delphi.
Next, let’s take a very similar chart, the bar chart, which is also good for comparing multiple values. It serves the same purpose, but may give you a more visually appealing way to display your data to make your point. You can also add trend lines to this type, but they may be less illustrative. I like to think of this kind of chart as a chariot race. Whose horse is in the lead? How many races or sales has my gladiator won?
How about the pie chart? Everyone loves pie! This kind of chart is good for representing how 100% of something is distributed amongst several areas. For instance, I might use a pie chart if I were Emperor of Rome and wanted to chart the different ways my gladiators have met their end in the arena. It might look something like this: out of all or 100% of the deceased gladiators, 25% were killed with spears, 35% died by the sword, and the other 40% were mauled by lions.
Besides column and pie charts, the next most popular has to be the line chart. When you’re trying to find trends over a period of time, the line chart is your tool. Now, let’s say you were Pandora and you just couldn’t control yourself. You might want to chart the daily effects of the death toll you have unleashed upon mankind when you took that little sneak peek. Just remember: Zeus likes to see the effects of his work in a neat little package when getting back at Prometheus.
Just to mix it up a bit, let’s say you wanted to show two things of vastly different sizes on the same chart but still have it be meaningful to your audience. If you were Caesar, you may have wanted to chart the wealth of the Senators to the overall wealth of each province they represented in the Roman Empire. You would have found that when plotting the personal wealth data with the province on the same column chart, the difference was so great that you couldn’t even see the columns for the Senators. Not to worry — there is a nice little technique for combining two types of charts like a column and a line, and it involves a secondary axis. I’ve included the instructions on how to do that in one of this week’s instructional tips in the blog posting for this podcast, located at www.productiveUpodcast.com.
This week’s tips include:
For Microsoft Excel:
- Seeing is Believing – Creating Charts
- Chartin’, Movin’, Re-usin’ – Breath New Life Into Old Chart
- Ring Around the Rows-ey – Switching from X to Y
- Second Best Is Not Bad – Adjusting Chart Layouts
- Pencil Me In – Working with Charts That Have Dates
- Hide and Seek and Data Gaps – Dealing with Missing Info
For Microsoft Access and Word:
This week’s featured eTraining class: Advanced Charting in Microsoft Excel.
Until next week…
The Gods may be crazy but you don’t have to be when it comes to Excel. So Stop on by and expand your knowledge at www.productiveUpodcast.com.
See you next week.
