Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson

I’m right at three months into my new gig, and, around the office, probably the most commonly known fact is, “He hates pie charts.” It’s not that I’ve exactly been standing at the elevator handing out leaflets explaining why pie charts are evil, but I have, apparently, chosen a couple of particularly public venues to [...]

As I wrote in my last post, I’ve been spending a lot of time building out Excel-based dashboard structures and processes of late. I also wrote a few weeks ago about calculating trend indicators. A natural follow-on to both of those posts is a look at the “metric widget” that I use as a basis [...]

Put this down as one of my more tactical posts, brought on by a fit of lingering annoyance with the use (and by “use” I mean “grotesque misuse”) of trend indicators on reports and dashboards. The trouble is that trends are a trickier business than they seem at first blush, and, at the same time, [...]

Ryan Goodman of Centigon Solutions wrote up his take on a recent discussion on LinkedIn that centered on the tension between data visualization that is “flashy” versus data visualization that rigorously adheres to the teachings of Tufte and Few. The third point in Goodman’s take is worth quoting almost in its entirety, as it is both [...]

Wow. This post started out not as a post, but as what I thought was going to be a 5-minute exercise with Google to download a colorblind-friendly palette for Excel charts. That was two weeks ago, and this post is just scratching the surface. Several weeks ago, one of the presenters in a meeting showed [...]

I caught an NPR story about recovery.gov last week, and it sounded really promising. Depending on where you fall on the political spectrum, the various rounds of stimulus and bailout funding that have come through over the past six months fall somewhere between “throwing money away,” “ready, fire, aim,” and “point in what seems what [...]

I wrote a post last week about PowerPoint and how easy it is to use it carelessly — to just open it up and start dumping in a bunch of thoughts and then rearranging the slides. That post wound up being, largely, a big, fat nod to Garr Reynolds / Presentation Zen. Since then, I’ve [...]

I got an e-mail last week just a few hours into Round 1 of this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The subject of the email was simply “dumb graph,” and the key line in the note was: The “game flow” graph…how in the WORLD is that telling me anything? That the score goes up as [...]

I attended a United Way meeting last week that was hosted at an overburdened county government agency site in south Columbus. The gist of the meeting was discussing the bleakness of the economy and what that could or should mean to the work of the committee. The head of the government agency did a brief [...]

How’s that for a book title? Would it pique your interest? Would you download it and read it? Do you have friends or co-workers who would be interested in it? Why am I asking? Because it doesn’t exist. Yet. Call it a working title for a project I’ve been kicking around in my head for a couple [...]