Ugly Real Economic Growth Chart from Singapore Statistics.

Singapore Statistics have the most amazing numbers on Singapore. Anything on our country’s GDP to how many handphones we have on average can be found. But the folks from SingStats seriously need to improve their charts.
Take a look here (http://www.singstat.gov.sg/stats/charts/econ.html#econA)

I could hardly make any sense out of these charts. They seems to be just thrown together with out any theme or purpose. After all the work of collecting the data, if you can’t present data in a useful manner, it’s simply a waste of efforts.

I took up the challenge to clean up this miserable chart using Excel, and try to show that beautiful charts can be useful to convery data in a clearer manner.

The improvements I made:
1. The distinct shape of our total economy is much clearer as an area chart.
2. The Manufacturing and Financial sectors are reduced to scatter chart with drop lines. The trends can still be discerned yet is less noisy compared to the original version.

Klipfolio, a beautiful dashboard software. Free!

I have always been a fan of Klipfolio (http://www.klipfolio.com). This tiny software features beautifully made dashboards that run on your desktop. It’s useful and very clever. Download it, try it. It’s a low risk way to see how dashboards can work and it’s FREE!

PowerUp Workshop: Making Beautiful Excel Charts

What if you could turn a drabby Excel chart:

into something like this?

For many Excel users, there is a need to produce clear, concise and even attractive charts in Excel without using expensive software. What is lacking are the clear techniques to do so. Compelled by this need, AEternus has designed a PowerUp Workshop to show participants how to achieve this objective.

The Workshop Outline:

• A collection of Formatting Chart Techniques.
• Demonstration of each technique to achieve beautiful results.
  • How to replicate a Wall Street Journal chart.
  • How to replicate a Economist Magazine chart.
  • How to replicate a New York Times chart (read why this chart is beautiful?).
• Reverse-engineer other beautiful charts.

This 1 day workshop will serve as the pre-requisite for the more advanced Creating Executive Dashboards in Excel workshop.

You can sign up Making Beautiful Excel Charts.

A gallery of Beautiful Charts for Excel part 4

I saw these couple of charts from the Standard Chartered Bank website.
Things I like about it:

1. Fresh colour scheme. Blues and greens work well together.
2. Bold titles that explain the intentions of each chart.
3. Each chart has an Increase/Decrease call out to emphasize the conclusion from the data trend.
4. Overall it’s a format that is pleasing to the eyes and easy to understand. Great job!

I hate pie charts for many reasons. But in this case, this particular pie tastes pretty good for the following reasons:

1. It looks pretty. Very nice color scheme . The green & blue hues fits nicely like Lego blocks.
2. Sorted and group slices with the biggest slices at the bottom. I can easily make out which slices are bigger.
3. I don’t feel confused. This pie chart uses only 6 slices which I can mentally organize in my head.
4. Overall clarity is well maintained with the skillful use of color, slice size sorting and small number of slices.

A gallery of Beautiful Charts for Excel part 3

The New York Times has the best illustrated charts I have ever seen. They are visually clear, easy to understand with good copy writing to explain the message behind a story. Note the use of blues and orange shades to give visual contrasts.

A gallery of Beautiful Charts for Excel part 2

I have scoured the web and magazines for beautiful charts designs that we can use in our Excel reports. This will be part of a gallery I am creating. Do visit this blog for regular updates.

A gallery of Beautiful Charts for Excel part 1

I have scoured the web and magazines for beautiful charts designs that we can use in our Excel reports. This will be part of a gallery I am creating. Do visit this blog for regular updates.

8 Excel Chart Formatting Tips

Excerpts from the Excel Chart Hacks & Techniques seminar.

I will demonstrate the following chart formatting tips starting from an Excel 2003 default.

1. Remove plot area colours and borders.

2. Remove any vertical grid-lines.

3. Change horizontal grid-line color from black to a very light shade of gray.

4. Adjust chart series colours to get better contrast, remove series borders.

5. Increase data visibility by removing legends and setting axis to a light gray or remove axis lines if it is not needed.

6. Adjust font scaling if it too big and distracting. Choose a light gray font if the axis labels are too prominent.

7. Remove chart area background colours and borders.

8. Use cells around the chart to implement more flexible titles and comments colours. Cells can be coloured to add more flexible backgrounds.

These are simple things you can do to enhance your Excel charts. Turn Now turn these simple tips into powerful tools to communicate your data and business insights. You can turn your Excel charts into full blown, beautifully designed diagrams in your annual reports, not with a publisher but with your very own staff. Place it on a SharePoint site to communicate information to your colleagues worldwide; put in the web so that it can be seen on an iPhone. With a bit of imagination, the options are endless.

You don’t have to be stuck doing the same things over and over again.

A crappy chart from the Straits Times. GIC looking to Asia, emerging markets

I’m going to take a potshot at the Straits Times on a chart I saw in the Money Section.

The chart was trying to compare GIC’s (Government of Singapore Investment Corporation) current asset mix to last year’s asset mix. It gave me an absolute headache. This is my list of grouses:

• Weak title. What does “ASSET MIX” really mean? There is plenty of space to say “Investment Asset Mix of GIC. 2009 vs 2008″. Without a clear title, I had to spend time trying to understand the numbers to know what this entire graphic was about.
• Confusing colours. Apparently, there was an unspecified “colour meaning” that I had to interpret. Not only I had to mentally process the pie charts, I had to decipher the colour codes from the list. By then, I had lost the overall message of the graphic.
• Numbers are all over the place. Why separate the numbers to the extreme sides of the graphic? My eyes had to swing from side to side to make meaning out of it. They should have been placed close together.
• Too many numbers. 50% of the numbers in the list were not involved in the pie charts. So why list them out? It dilutes the strength of the charts. Make them smaller or simply don’t use it.

This would be my version of the graphic done in Excel 2007.

Things I have done:

• Avoided pie charts. Our eyes judge lengths much better than angles.
• Labeled the data series and provided values right into the chart. Hence lists and even charts axis are not needed. This creates a more compact graphic.
• Added commentary to give the chart a purpose and message.

This is my version of the data without the chart:

A New York Times Chart.

I was surfing the web and came across this chart from the New York Times. My attention was totally captivated by this intricate chart. It says that healthy food are getting more expensive while junk foods are getting cheaper! What’s noteworthy about this chart is that the designer didn’t simply just plot the line charts. That’s way too easy and lazy.

Instead, he added detailed titles, notes and foot notes around the chart. He used great colour combinations to make the individual line charts appear calm & coordinated. He highlighted the individual data series to add clarity. And he did all this within a few inches of space! The result is a compact chart that tells a reader so much an entire article was brought to life by this tiny picture.

I wondered how many of us out there pay so much attention and effort to our charts? You probably say “I don’t do this because its not worth the trouble”. Well, you missed out a perfect chance to be remarkable to your colleagues and management. You say “Its impossible to do this chart.” Here’s one I did in Excel 2003:

You say “I don’t know how”. We’ll teach you here.

Any more excuses not to be great?

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