Talk on Drawing Graphs in Excel that are Not on its Menus

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. Sites include:

http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/BoxWhisker.html

http://www.mis.coventry.ac.uk/~nhunt/boxplot.htm

http://home.clara.net/dkeith/excel/box-plots.html

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 and Exceluser.com can handle more than one series.

http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/DotPlot.html

http://processtrends.com/TOC_chart_gallery.htm

http://www.exceluser.com/dash/dotplot.html

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
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 for creating multipanel charts in Excel:

http://www.processtrends.com/pg_charts_parallel_XY_chart.htm

http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/StackedCharts.html

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.colorbrewer.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.colorbrewer.org (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 http://www.r-project.org. S-Plus is commercial software available from Insightful, http://www.insightful.com.

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