Beautiful Charts, Courtesy of Ed Tufte
This year for Christmas I received a fantastic book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. It reviews best practices for charts, graphs, and tables that opened my eyes to how data should be presented. In it he discusses how to improve your data-ink ratio, eliminate chart junk, and tell how honest a chart is. He also came up with an graphical invention called sparklines, tiny graphs meant to be embedded into text and tables. If you’re a chart nerd like I am, definitely check it out.
We keep track of the queue levels at every operation in our facility. Here’s a good example of how we were able to reduce 12 charts down to three without losing any information.
Before
After
Big thanks to this nifty Excel AddIn for getting Sparklines to work properly.
January 12th, 2010 at 10:12 pm
[...] at my Conveyor Blog I made a post about some charts I updated at work based on a book I read by Edward Tufte, the Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Share [...]
July 7th, 2010 at 11:38 am
[...] The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte: There’s a science to making great charts and graphs and this is the textbook. If you make charts for your job, you absolutely have to read this. See our results. [...]