Getting the Most from Excel Charts

Over at The Why Axis, Jon Schwabish has a great show-and-tell on improving economic visuals in Excel. He starts with a chart of job openings data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that was clearly made using Excel’s default settings (click charts to enlarge):

bls-in11

Jon demonstrates many improvements. I particularly like this one:

bls-in4

To my eye, this chart is way better than the original, although it shares one big flaw: the horizontal spacing of the dots doesn’t match the timing. Jon then corrects that and adds more information (I might have stopped with just getting the spacing right):

bls-in8

Check out his original post for an easy guide to the how and why of these changes and a copy of his Excel file.

One thought on “Getting the Most from Excel Charts”

  1. hey there and thank you for your info – I have certainly picked up something new from right here. I did however expertise some technical issues using this web site, since I experienced to reload the web site many times previous to I could get it to load correctly. I had been wondering if your web host is OK? Not that I’m complaining, but slow loading instances times will often affect your placement in google and can damage your high-quality score if advertising and marketing with Adwords. Anyway I’m adding this RSS to my e-mail and can look out for much more of your respective exciting content. Make sure you update this again soon.

Comments are closed.

%d bloggers like this: