Conveyors and Accumulation Tables » tufte http://www.garvey.com We Handle It Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:18:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Beautiful Charts, Courtesy of Ed Tufte http://www.garvey.com/2010/01/beautiful-charts-courtesy-of-ed-tufte/ http://www.garvey.com/2010/01/beautiful-charts-courtesy-of-ed-tufte/#comments Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:18:37 +0000 Ben Garvey http://www.garvey.com/?p=975 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.

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