How to
Draw Some Useful Charts Not on Excel Menus
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Watch for the description of a new program, How to Draw Some Useful Charts Not on Excel Menus
DURATION: TBD
Here are some resources that will be mentioned in this program.
1. Box Plots
A
number of websites give instructions for drawing box plots using Excel but most
do not include outliers. Therefore, I prefer the utility of Jon Peltier since it
does handle outliers. It is available from Jon
Peltier's Utilities.
2. Dot
Plots
Here are some sources that provide instructions for drawing dot plots in
Excel or provide macros or utilities to do so. Jon Peltier’s utility and the instructions from
processtrends.com can handle more than one series.
http://processtrends.com/TOC_chart_gallery.htm
or you can send an email to
naomi@nbr-graphs.com for a macro to draw dot plots with Excel 2003.
3. Month
Plots
http://www.processtrends.com/pg_charts_monthly_cycle_chart.htm
provides instructions for creating a month plot using Excel. (web page of D. Kelly O’Day.)
The following sites are useful for adding data labels used in dummy
axes:
XY
Chart Labeler
http://www.appspro.com/Utilities/ChartLabeler.htm%20
J-Walk Tools
http://j-walk.com/ss/excel/files/charttools.htm
4. Arrow
Plots
Send an email to naomi@nbr-graphs.com for a macro to draw arrow charts
using Excel 2003.
5.
Multipanel Plots
The following sites
give instructions and/or utilities for creating multipanel charts in Excel:
http://www.processtrends.com/pg_charts_parallel_XY_chart.htm
Jon
Peltier's Utilities (Jon calls them panel
charts.)
6. Sparklines
|
Edward Tufte introduced
sparklines in his book Beautiful Evidence .
Companies offering Excel add-ons to draw sparklines include BonaVista
Systems and Bissantz. The example shown was
drawn using MicroCharts from BonaVista Systems available from http://www.microcharts.net. More
information on sparklines is available at http://www.edwardtufte.com/ under
ask E.T. Click on search and then enter sparklines. |
7. Bullet
Graphs
|
Bullet graphs are
described in Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few.
Instructions for drawing bullet graphs as well as an inexpensive utility
for drawing them are available at http://www.exceluser.com/catalog/landbullet1.htm
|
8. Other
Useful Links
I’m also including some links that I find to be invaluable when drawing
graphs. For choosing colors go to http://www.colorbrewer2.org/. A
helpful utility to see how readers who have color vision deficiencies see the
colors you used is available at http://www.vischeck.com/. More information
on choosing colors accessible to those with color vision deficiencies is
included in Steven Gardner’s master thesis, http://www.colorbrewer2.org%20/(click
on updates in the upper right-hand corner and then scroll down to Section 3),
and at the website of the Lighthouse, http://www.lighthouse.org/accessibility/effective-color-contrast/.
An invaluable tool for matching colors is found at http://www.colorschemer.com/colorpix_info.php.
Finally, I use SnagIt available from TechSmith (http://www.techsmith.com/ ) to capture the
images I want to check with vischeck and for many
other purposes. I don’t know how I managed before I discovered these utilities.
The resources above show that one can use Excel for graphs that are not
on its menus. However, it is easier to use software designed to draw these
graphs if you know the necessary language. R, an implementation of the S
language, is open source software that is extremely powerful and is available at
no cost from file:///C:/Users/Naomi/Documents/NBR/Web%20page/current%20page/%0d%0ahttp:/www.r-project.org.
S-Plus is commercial software available from Tibco, http://www.spotfire.tibco.com/.
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