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December 4, 2011

Choosing a good chart type – A Cheat Sheet

6 comments

Charles Schaefer’s session at TCC11 “Understanding and Working with Chart Types” included this decent flow diagram for choosing a chart type.  As the title says, it’s “A Thought-Starter”.  In other words, use it as a way to get you going down the right path.  This absolutely shouldn’t be taken as gospel; use your common sense.  For example:

  1. Don’t ever create 3D area charts.  In fact, don’t ever create a 3D chart of ANY kind.
  2. Never create a circular area chart
  3. When created a stacked column chart don’t connecting the same colored bars with lines.

You can download the materials from Charles’ session here.  Included are a JPG and PDF version of the flow chart.

The flowchart originates from a blog post back in 2006 on The Extreme Presentation Method blog.  This blog, in turn, links to an interactive version of the chart chooser on Juice Analytics.  Although Tableau does a lot of this thinking for you, definitely check out the interactive tool to get a feel for some best practices and download the sample excel workbooks to quickly recreate these charts yourself.

6 comments :

  1. My recent blog post, "Thinking Outside the Chart Menu," is relevant here http://onforb.es/uyDVA3

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  2. On my blog I have a similar webpage for a while: http://apandre.wordpress.com/choiceofchart/ and in addition a blog post about dimensionality of charts:

    http://apandre.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/dimensionality/

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  3. Thanks Naomi and Andrei! I'm now following your RSS feeds.

    I thought maybe I was posting something new, but you've obviously beaten me to the punch.

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  4. 3D charts are admittedly rubbish. What you really to keep down with the kids are 4D charts. Especially 4D pie charts.

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  5. You can also find more information on the graphic in Abela's book Advanced Presentation by Design, page 99.

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  6. I posted this guide in my office at work, and if I had a dollar for every time it strikes up a conversation, I'd retire early. Thanks for sharing Andy.

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