DSA Insights

There is a new page on the Support Analytics website called ProSourcing.  Also, the Solutions page has now been changed to be called Consulting.  In addition, there are a few new quick links under the image on all of the pages to easily navigate to the blog or blog subscription page.

The main reason for this change is because Support Analytics now has two distinct capabilities: Analytics Consulting and Analytics ProSourcing.

ProSourcing is simply the outsourcing of data analyses to Support Analytics.  One of the recurring themes that we have experienced in the past is companies not having the resources or knowledge to perform analytics at the level it is needed.  Another situation that warrants ProSourcing is when a key knowledge expert leaves the company without training anyone or leaving adequate documentation on how analytic functions were completed.

There are some other reasons that we have decided to provide this service to our clients, which can be found on the ProSourcing page.

Check it out and feel free to provide feedback!

Just last week, I was reminded of the scene from The Christmas Story where the father (Darren McGavin) finally gets his "contest prize" delivered to the house.  There was so much excitement and mystery about what he had won.  Well, I shared that same type of excitement when the big brown truck delivered my copy of Excel Basics to Blackbelt: An Accelerated Guide to Decision Support Designs directly from the publisher.  This book, which reminds of a college text book, just hit the book stores on July 7th.  There are a few Excel books that I wouldn’t do without, but this book is different from the ones in my library.  This book explores the opportunities in Excel for decision support instead of Excel functions.  Throughout my career, I have created many decision support spreadsheets that helped management make more informed decisions.  I think this book will help build upon that résumé and explore new ideas or design methods.

As I get into the book, I will be sure to share my thoughts here on DSA Insights.  Some sections that caught my attention upon a quick flip through the pages were:

4.1 Value of Data Visualization

4.3 Visualizing Constraints

6.0 The Analytics of Optimization

7.0 Complex Optimization

10.0 Visualizing Complex Analytical Dynamics

Note: there is no payment or quid pro quo arrangement for these comments or review.

Instead of calling them pie charts, we’ll just call them donut (doughnut) charts and make them magically delicious.  Wrong.  These two charts, which appeared in the July 14th issue of BusinessWeek, are some of the worst charts I’ve seen in a while.  Note: in the print version, the legend doesn’t cover up the actual chart.  I’m not sure why this wasn’t fixed in the online graphic. 

There have been many articles and blog posts written on the ineffectiveness of pie charts, so I won’t belabor the point more.  For more information about why pie charts (donut charts with the center filled in) are not a good data visualization option, see the links below.  There’s no point in saying the same thing in a different way.  The timing of this post is good being that Seth Godin recently created a lot of stir about bar charts, which led to more pie chart discussions.

Related books:

Creating More Effective Graphs by Naomi B. Robbins

Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten by Stephen Few

Related links on discussion of Bar and Pie charts:

DSA Insights

Jon Peltier

Peltier Technical Services

Jorge Camoes - Charts

Juice Analytics Original

Juice Analytics

Stephen Few

Edward Tufte

Junk Charts

Note: the first pie chart is credited to William Playfair roughly 200 years ago.

The graphic above is a pretty good example of an effective dashboard in my humble opinion.  It doesn’t use a lot of space, yet shows an abundance of data to compare the companies.  Also, notice the sector segmentation using color and columns.  Great job BusinessWeek!

Can you tell me what’s missing with the graphic above?  It has to be the analyst in me, but the first thing I noticed is what’s wasn’t there in this graphic.  Click here to get the answer!

Here is the key to the boxes above. 

This graphic above is another great example of a dashboard type display showing sales and R&D.  I would have thought that Apple spends more on R&D as a percentage of sales than just 3.3%.

Source: www.businessweek.com

Below is a line graph showing how the top companies performed compared to the S&P Global and S&P 500 index.  I prefer no legends and adding the description to each line.

With gasoline prices increasing so much lately, I have noticed a dramatic increase in the data/info visualizations related to them.  Here are some that I hope you will find useful.  The first two charts below were found at Gasbuddy and show the average price of gasoline mashed up in a map similar to Google maps.  The second map shows the gas stations and gas prices local to Support Analytics in Columbia, MD.  If I was impacted more from the increase in gas prices, I might use this to shop around for the lowest price per gallon.  Being that I drive about a mile a day and my wife has a government issued vehicle, it wouldn’t affect me unless gas prices were $100 per gallon, which isn’t likely.

Source: www.gasbuddy.com

Source: www.gasbuddy.com

Here is a visual of what makes up the price for gas in 2004, when the average price was $1.85 per gallon versus 2008 where we are now paying roughly $4.03 per gallon on average.  Looking back at the first chart above, you can see how your state/city compares to other states and the national average.  If you live in California or the left coast, I hope you own a Prius.  One fact that I would have expected to see below is a dramatic increase in the distribution cost of gas between 2004 and 2008, which actually decreased.  Seems like there should be an almost perfect correlation between distribution costs and the price of gas, right?  Maybe the impact is hidden due to the category being both distribution and marketing.

Source: www.thebiblog.com

Below are three charts which originated in the NY Times.  The map shows the average price of gas per gallon in a format that I think is much better than the Gasbuddy one above.  Again, if you live in California, I really feel for you.  In the second graphic below, there is a nice timeline dating back to 1920 and going through 2007.  The third line graph highlights the last 18 years of the second chart.  They also do a nice job of highlighting the significant events along the line graph.

Source: www.nytimes.com and viewed at www.flowingdata.com

The last section contains a few graphics that I found in BusinessWeek.  I’ve said before that I do not like pie charts unless you really just want to show how two parts make up the whole.  Even still, a bar chart would take up less space.  The data in the pie refers to a survey asking, does the increase in gas prices have an impact on travel plans of those who are planning a trip by automobile?  Maybe a better question would have been, does the increase in gas prices impact you putting off a vacation or not traveling at all.  I think the results would be much different.

Source: www.businessweek.com

This graphic, which I really like, shows the increase in round trip cost by car and by SUV for various city-to-city travel.  Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s the total cost because it’s only the incremental difference.

Source: www.businessweek.com

The next bar chart highlights that the overall cost of traveling has increased by 5.1% over the past five years (bar in black).

Average annual percentage increase in prices since 2003:

Source: www.businessweek.com

This last column chart illustrate the percentage change in gasoline consumption from the previous year.  We are down quite a bit from this time last year; a 4% swing, as you might expect.

Source: www.businessweek.com

Do you have any gasoline related charts, graphs or visualizations to share?

Wondering what we listen to hear at Support Analytics?  With the help of Wordle, you can now visualize our iTunes music library.  Some of the big artists jump right out at you - U2, Dave Matthews, Billy Joel, Frank Sinatra, Coldplay, PearlJam, Aerosmith, and LinkinPark to name a few.  One big limitation is the size of the small, less prominent, artists.  They are pretty much unreadable.  But, that may just be the point.

“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends”.  Source: www.wordle.net

Business Application:

I think word clouds would be awesome for brainstorming?  Think about this: Have someone on your team record all of the ideas of team members separately and use Wordle to visualize which ideas were the most prominent.  They would jump right out at you using this technology and an unbiased method of collecting.

A special thanks goes to Angela who told me about Wordle.

Here are some other variations of our iTunes library with different layouts, colors and fonts using Wordle.  Their customization is excellent.

I just can’t seem to help myself when it comes to sharing beauties like the pie chart below with my readers.  The pie chart was found here.  Yes, it’s colorful.  Yes, it’s an example of pimping your chart.  And finally, yes, it’s extremely ineffective.  Just recreating this chart accurately was nearly impossible because of the small slices that are not even visible.

It takes entirely too long to go from legend to chart, legend to chart, legend to chart, (you get the point) to cross reference the two.  A simple bar/column chart would have been a much better choice.

Here is my version that took me longer to figure out which values referenced which slice percentages than creating the actual chart.

Suggested Reading:

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition

Visualizing Data

Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten

Creating More Effective Graphs

Here are two charts that débuted in the June 9th issue of BusinessWeek and reminded me of a recent newsletter from Stephen Few found here.  I have noticed that they [BusinessWeek} tend to use colors that jump out at you for that WOW factor.  I may not have picked this color, but when you see all of the graphics with the same color scheme on one page, it definitely works.

Here is the Excel color palette, which contains the lime green color.   In the chart on top, the graphic designer used the top color (black) and the middle color (lime green) found below to differentiate between 2004 and 2008.  In the map image, just lime green was used to highlight some states regarding the average cost per day for a private room in a nursing home.

As I learned from Stephen Few's newsletter, an excellent expert resource regarding color [besides Stephen's article} is Cindy Brewer's website found here.

Here are a few examples regarding the use of color in a column chart.  In my opinion, the first example below is one of the biggest abuses of color in chart design.

Novice:

Often, I see colors used in charts with the sole purpose to be colorful.  A perfect example would be the rainbow column chart (below), where a different color is used for each column.

Better:

A better option for the column chart would be to use more effective colors that are all the same.

Expert:

An expert may use the same color except for the column that they are pointing out.  By using this technique, the reader's attention is immediately drawn to the value for June (black).

Best:

A line graph would be a better option for showing the Widget sales over time.  Whenever time is on the x-axis, a line graph is probably a better option unless you're trying to illustrate a certain point.  If you want to highlight a certain time period, the use of text boxes [with high transparency] can be handy.

Do you think they mean the same thing?  I often find these two terms used interchangeably when I think they refer to different things.  Check out the discussion thread in our Facebook discussion group!

Support Analytics - Facebook Group Discussion

A few months ago, I wrote about an alternative way to present fractions (parts of a whole) instead of using a typical and flawed pie chart.  The first graphic below comes from BusinessWeek and the second one is DSA’s Excel created version.

Jon Peltier (Microsoft MVP) of Peltier Technical Services and PTS Blog, recently wrote me to tell me about a workbook in Excel, which contains VBA code to create something similar to our dollar visualization.  The results, which only took me a few minutes using Jon’s workbook, are below in the third graphic.  It’s a fairly useful tool to do something different for your audience.

Finally, the last graphic was created from a similar workbook in Excel by Andy Pope, Microsoft MVP.  The workbook (link below) contains instructions regarding how Andy was able to accomplish splitting the image.

In the related section at the end of this post are links to the workbooks and web sites of the creators.  Feel free to check them out!  If you are interested in how I created the DSA Insights version, feel free to contact me and I can walk you through it.

Thank you Jon and Andy!

BusinessWeek Version:

DSA Insights Excel Version:

Jon Peltier Excel Version with Easy Macro:

Andy Pope Excel Version (different Picture) with instructions:

Original Post:

Spending InfoVis, DSA Insights

Resources:

Jon’s Workbook, Jon Peltier

PTS Blog, Jon Peltier

Version of splitting a graphic, Andy Pope

Andy’s Workbook, Andy Pope

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures at Amazon.com