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
Here’s the list of participants to date for the DSA Insights Post Project. As more enter the project, this list will be updated. Thank you to everyone who participated!
Get your submissions in before the deadline on Friday at midnight.
If you are already blogging, feel free to submit a post to me for consideration in this project and to win a prize! Click here to submit a post. Based on the feedback I have received and the gracious offerings from some excellent Authors, there will be more DSA Projects in the future. Plus, who doesn’t like to get free things?
I have started a new discussion thread in the Support Analytics - Insights Facebook Group around the number one issue when analyzing data. Think you know what I’m referring to? Check out the new group to find out and add your wisdom.
Support Analytics - Insights Facebook Group
Some areas that are typically challenging, but not my #1 issue, when analyzing data are:
Related:
Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
Facebook is listed as the 8th most popular web site in the WORLD according to Alexa! I think Facebook serves some great purposes among a lot of silly applications and things to waste time. The purpose of this group is to further promote the discussion and ideas surrounding Business Analytics and Data Visualization with a little consulting thrown in. Many blogs, groups and web sites focus on the technical aspect of analytics and data visualization. In this group, I will try to keep it less technical and more practical to just about anyone.
Click on the link below to see the new DSA Insights Facebook group.
Support Analytics - Insights Facebook Group
Related:
I’m on Facebook–Now What???: How to Get Personal, Business, and Professional Value from Facebook
Authors James Taylor and Neil Raden are sponsoring a signed copy of their book, Smart (Enough) Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions ($39 value) that will be added to the DSA Insights Post Project prize list. This is an excellent book, which is featured in the DSA Amazon Store because of its tremendous value. Find out more about the book here.
Don’t wait, send in your blog post now to be eligible for one of the prizes below. If you don’t know about the DSA Insights Post Project yet, click here to find out more.
The list of available prizes are now:
1st Price (Choice of one)
2nd Prize
Coming soon is a list of submissions to-date for the project
Announcement:
It’s time for DSA Insights to announce an opportunity to win a prize in a way that should be fun, exciting and valuable to our readers. There are two prizes to be claimed, which are:
1st Prize (choice of one):
2nd Prize:
Theme:
Your task is to write a new post in your blog that is themed, “The most important thing I know about__(Enter a topic below)__, is ___.”
Available topics that follow the theme of DSA Insights are:
Instructions:
Note: old posts written before today will not be accepted.
Timeline:
Begins:
Thursday, May 1
(today)
Ends:
Friday, May 16 - end of day your time zone.
Winners Announced:
Monday 19 May - I will announce the two winners in a featured blog post. All entries (up to eight) will be listed and two different people will be selected at random.
Winners will be contacted and will need to provide a valid U.S. mailing address if a book is selected as the prize. International winners will default to an Amazon gift card delivered via e-mail.
A special thank you goes to Lou Spirito, Graphics Director at the Baltimore Sun for providing the graphs below and some valuable insight.
Recently, I wrote a blog post about the homicide rate in Baltimore and included the second graph below, which can be found here.
Lou was gracious enough to share with me that the original graph that was designed for the article was the second one below, which is a bar chart overlaid with two series. Then, the chart was redesigned to be the line chart shown below. Prior to the release, it was then reverted back to the originally designed bar chart. I have said before that I prefer line charts to stacked bar charts, but this may be an exception. Here is a quote from Lou that explains part of the design choice.
“I agree with your observation that in this particular case the bars are superior to the line chart for the simple reason that the relationship of the “annual” and “first quarter” data remains unified — this relationship gets lost to some degree in the line chart.” [Lou Spirito]
Because the two series have a significant scale variance, it is helpful to use the bar chart where you can add the values to the smaller series that has less variance between the years than the second series. Adding values to the line chart would make it unreadable.
Granted, both would work well and serve the purpose, but I really like the bar chart with the two overlaid series. Also, the use of color is clean, neat and effective without being gaudy. I may have changed the labels on the x-axis to be every five or ten years, but otherwise it is well designed.
Content is king and sometimes that means going unconventional. See Lou’s comment below.
“We take great care to design graphics with content driving the way. Sometimes it means breaking standard convention at the risk of fielding criticism…” [Lou Spirito]
Intermediate design before reverting back to the original:
Original and Final Design:
Which one do you think is more effective and why?
During the months of April and May 2008, BonaVista Systems is running an Excel Dashboard competition. I have said before that their MicroCharts product is exceptional for dashboard design and improving presentations or Excel analytics. The new version (3) has a lot of great new features, which can be found here.
MicroCharts is the first software, to my knowledge, that has a solution for creating Sparklines in Excel without having to finagle using the old camera feature. MicroCharts is easy to use and truly a great product. For under $200, you can get this add-on for Excel. You can download MicroCharts and try it for free for 30 days.
For the last few days, I have seen many of the blogs that I read promote this competition. I have been hesitant to follow suit because of redundancy, but also believe that it would be a shame for my readers to miss out on this event.
Winners of the competition will receive:
Some other exceptional blog/web sites that you should check out are:
The bar chart below made the cover of the Baltimore Sun newspaper on April 7, 2008. It definitely caught my eye because of its design and my passion for data/info visualization. In the past, I have been a bit unkind to stacked bar charts, as a quick glance through the previous blog posts could quickly confirm. My first impression was that this was going to be another example of what not to do using stacked bar charts.
After taking a closer look, this turns out to be a good example of visualizing data. Sure, it’s no line graph, but this chart is very effective for one fundamental reason. Both series, Annual Homicide Total and First Quarter numbers, have the same baseline - zero. By having both series start at zero, the chart is turned into a simple bar chart with two overlaid series versus a stacked bar chart.
The values for the first quarter numbers are labeled probably because they would be hard to determine due to the scale being high to accommodate for both series. My guess would be that this chart was embellished with a graphic program like, Adobe Illustrator. However, the same results could be done in Excel with a little finagling. The callout boxes are strategically placed to point out the significant figures like lowest, highest, starting and prior year.
Source: Baltimore Sun & Baltimore Police Dept.
The Google map below accompanied the bar chart from above on the Baltimore Sun’s website. Having a vested interest in the Baltimore area, I quickly looked to see where the most homicides were and if there seemed to be a pattern. I love the interactivity of Google maps driven by a set of data!
Source: Data compiled by Sun reporter Gus Sentementes using information from the City of Baltimore. Baltimoresun.com designer Stephen Mekosh produced the Google Map mashup.
For my fellow The Wire (HBO Series) enthusiasts, you can see if the West side has more homicides than the East side thanks to the Marlow and Barksdale crews. I’m sure that Pryzbylewski (a.k.a. “Prez”) and Detective Freamon would love to see these stats pinned to their board.
You are currently browsing the archives for the Analytics category.
