Juice Analytics

Great to see that you picked up the idea, and made this challenge around it! Being able to do more than the old pie and bar charts in Excel makes these techniques accessible to a lot more people, and hopefully shows them how much more can be done with visualization than the simple things Excel offers directly.

I agree with some of the comments in the other posting, there are some issues with perception here. Especially when only showing one number, filling the cells from the bottom (like a bar chart) is probably a better idea. However, when comparing several numbers, having areas as square as possible is preferable (squarified treemaps have shown this quite clearly). But this shows that even for simple graphics like this, there is still quite a bit of work to be done to understand how to use them most effectively.

Anyway, great blog, and you have really active readers/contributors!

[...] Nice ways of getting square pie charts. We’ll have to start using them. [...]

[...] Nice ways of getting square pie charts. We’ll have to start using them. [...]

Fantastic. And LOVE the video.

The challenge now is for someone to build in the functionality for showing two different ranges in the same chart.

I answered my own question and emailed in a solution (building on the previous work) that allows multiple values in the same chart. It is also here: http://beglen.googlepages.com/square_pie_DBB.xls

Looks nice, I think this is a terrible chart, for reason as made before, but it does look nice. I could not view the video sadly, in FF or IE – could you put in on youtube?

This excercise flashed my memory back ages ago when someone showed me how to make a squared circle. But that’s maths, not Excel.

Surely to show 2 values in the same chart you’ll have the 1 colour which is the lower number, then the 2nd colour which is the higher number, the 2nd colour only needs to be stacked ontop of the 1st colour to show the comparitive difference?

[...] Toch lijkt deze uitwerking niet echt een goed alternatief: Optisch lijkt de eerste “taart” (of kunnen we deze grafiek beter “cake” noemen?) voor meer dan 56% gevuld. Een andere invulling (bijvoorbeeld hele regels van onderaf naar boven) vangt dit wellicht op. Ook het invullen van meerdere segmenten kan onduidelijk worden. Mocht je toch een vierkante taart willen maken in Excel, op Juice Analytics staan enkele in Excel uitgewerkte voorbeelden. [...]

[...] In that alert I found a blog post on Data Visualization Gone Wrong, which was fun to read and reminded me of the Coda Hale’s rant against Google Analytics’ pie charts. The Gone Wrong posting led me to juiceanalytics, which is also helpful. [...]

[...] Als oplossing wordt de square pie-chart gegeven. De blog juiceanalytics heeft hier van een aantal Excel bestanden gepost. [...]

[...] If you need something to do during your time off, try out the great online graph service Swivel, or try making the coolest SQUARE PIE-CHART graphs with SPSS! Post all your creations in our comments… [...]

Hi there,

to make things more complicated, I would like that my square actually displays with two different colors (in addition to white or “empty”). Say, I have a value of 62 (which is for example the Percentage of students finishing a course). Then I have another value, say 38 which is the Percentage (out of the total) of students finishing with a specifc grade.

So, my square looks like this (2 for those students finishing and 1 for those with a specific grade):

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
0 0 0 2 2 2 2 2 2 1
0 0 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1
0 0 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1
0 0 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1
0 0 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1
0 0 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1
0 0 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1

But how can I visualize it in this way: http://geodata.grid.unep.ch/Picture_2.png ?

Stephan, Here’s a quick capsule of one way to do what you want.

Create a 10×10 block and number the blocks in the order in which you would like them to be filled. For instance:

1 2 5 . . . . . . .
3 4 6 . . . . . . .
7 8 9 . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .

Then if you want to show blocks for two values (call them A and B), use a two level conditional format to colorize the blocks:

IF blockval <= A: make color red

IF blockval <= A+B: make color orange

HI, 

Its fantastic article guys and very useful for all. 

Thanks for it.