Recreating the NY Times Cancer Graph

This New York Times cancer graph is a beautiful piece of work.

NY Times cancer graphic

I wanted to see if we could reproduce it with everyday tools.

Excel reproduction of the NY Times cancer graphic

Click here to watch a screencast showing how it was done. Warning the screencast is a little long—14 minutes—and a little unpolished. One cut, no retakes, banzai analytics!

Derek raised an interesting question about how to find the fonts used by the New York Times. While I don't think you can find a high quality free version of these fonts (Helvetica Neue, Univers?), Microsoft has made some very good new fonts for Vista and these are also available to Microsoft Office users through a compatibility pack. Here's a link or google for "microsoft office compatibility pack". I recommend using these fonts.

Here's a version of the graph with these new fonts and more emphasis on getting the typography right.

Excel reproduction of the NY Times cancer graphic with better fonts

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. All source code is released under a BSD License unless otherwise specified.

35 comments | Show all comments only the last 5 are shown


November 14, 2007
Javaun said:

Hi Derek. I too use Excel 2003, and so I guess I don't have the bar transparency feature that Shawn proposed to make the gridline appear to float over the bar. Still, Shawn's idea would work to make the gridline float over the bar but appear transparent on the background. He simply needs to change the dotted gridline color to white. The white will show briefly through the transparency (may appear off-white) but will be indistinguishable against the backround. I'm guessing that for the NY Times graph, they did a rough mockup in excel using ugly colors and ugly fonts, and then a designer traced it (to preserve the scale) in Illustrator and beautified it with color and fonts.


December 27, 2007
sesha said:

Great work. Keep posting to benefit many like me.
Can you also help me in constructing graphs on a mckinsey chart that we use at our office. My problem is to edit the text boxes and graphs every time i need to update the data


December 27, 2007
Zach said:

Sesha, we have developed an approach for automatically updating PowerPoint slides (charts, text boxes, tables) from Excel spreadsheets. I'm not sure if that is exactly what you are referring to. We can discuss offline if it is.


January 7, 2008
Sarah said:

I created a similar graph using Jon Peltier's tornado graph as a starting point. I was able to get white gridlines on top of the bars by creating a dummy series and then adding y-error bars. I had the additional requirement of getting the Male and Female sides into a single chart, so I had to use a dummy series for the y axis anyway. Here is what it looks like: http://flickr.com/photos/saamiam/2176279190/


June 3, 2008
brandie said:

my father died of lung cancer...hahahha jking

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"Business Intelligence isn't a technical problem, it's a social problem"

Yesterday I presented to an B-eye-network audience our perspective on why business intelligence is broken and what can be done to fix it. The full PDF-version (4mb) of the presentation can be downloaded.

A sampling of the fun:

"Chart-based encryption -- data goes in, no information comes out"

Chart-based encryption

On the excessive emphasis on reporting over analysis...

Herding

"Technologists are looking to build an atomic-baloney slicer"..."Nobody ever got fired for adding more requirements"

Waiting

"Data analysis isn't just for the data analysts anymore"

Typing is to...

"Have you ever working with a reporting tool that outputted to PDF?"Sheep

Hopefully we stirred the pot a little with this presentation. A recording of the B-eye-network event should be available soon.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. All source code is released under a BSD License unless otherwise specified.

13 comments | Show all comments only the last 5 are shown


March 29, 2007
Jay Jakosky said:

Nice presentation and your example were excellent.


April 12, 2008
Yaju Arya said:

Excellent stuff, awesome!!


May 5, 2008
Emily Breed said:

Zach, the cows-vs.-cats comparison is a great one. Would it be all right to borrow that idea? (I work in risk management, and we deal with a lot of people who'd prefer to pay attention to the cows only, even though we have cats overrunning the place...)


May 5, 2008
Zach said:

Emily, feel free...and use the pictures too.


May 8, 2008
Drew said:

Nice work! Thanks for sharing this.

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A Juice Web Event: Empowering the Analyst

Our friends at Tableau invited us to lead off a webinar about the broken bits of Business Intelligence and what is needed to fix it. With the provocative title "The Score: IT-centric BI — 5, Information Worker — 0", we intend to hit blog-themes such as the plight of the noble but beaten-down analyst, the misplaced emphasis on bulky technology solutions, and the false deification of the Executive Dashboard.We'd love to have you stop by on March 22 at 2:00 ET. Go here to register.

The session abstract is below:

Empowering the "Everyday Data" Analyst

Like it or not, we've all become "everyday data" analysts during the last decade. We became document specialists and spreadsheet experts ten years before that. We have standard tools for creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations right on our desktops. These applications are familiar and easy to use – even if we only use them infrequently. Why don't we have the same for working with data?

Everyone agrees that we have plenty of data—it streams through our departments and across our desktops everyday. But despite the big, IT-centric BI solutions that exist in our organizations, it's the tools and skills for investigating and making sense of "everyday data" that we're missing. The people who have the most to gain from data analysis are often the least capable of doing so. Where's the BI equivalent of Word or Visio?

Join Zach Gemignani, co-founder of Juice Analytics for this free web seminar. Based on his years of experience with analytics client engagements, you will hear him present the real-world struggle of "everyday data" analysts. You will learn:

  • How the IT-centric view of BI should change
  • How do we empower our "everyday data" analysts in our organizations
  • What shifts in approach and technology are necessary for effectively working with data

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. All source code is released under a BSD License unless otherwise specified.

1 comment


March 23, 2007
Wade said:

Missed (unfortunately) the webinar. Will you be making any materials from the event available on your site?

Cheers,
Wade

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Squaring the Pie Solutions Screencast

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. All source code is released under a BSD License unless otherwise specified.

1 comment


November 17, 2007
Brett said:

Is there a reason that the navigation to the next and previous posts etc has not been included on this page. It makes this page a bit of a dead end and having to navigate around it seems a bit clumsy. Really great site guys!!

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Solving the Pie

Last week I challenged the you to reproduce this alternative to pie charts in Excel. I promised a screencast to show how it's done.

Square Pie

Eighteen people answered the call with nearly three dozen different solutions. Click here to watch the screencast showing how to accomplish the two most popular solutions; filling cells with conditional formatting and pushing the column chart to extremes.

If you want to look at the source,Clint Ivy produced an excellent version of the cell filling approach.

square_pie_clint_ivy.xls

Dermot Balson submitted an terrific version of the column chart approach.

square_pie_dermot_balson.xls

Thank you to everyone who submitted a solution.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. All source code is released under a BSD License unless otherwise specified.

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December 21, 2006
Googlizing myself | Chris Teplovs said:

[...] 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. [...]


December 22, 2006
Mozlog.nl marktonderzoek weblog » Blog Archief » Square pie-chart of pie-chart? said:

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


December 25, 2006
SPSSlog.com » Happy holidays! said:

[...] 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… [...]


August 14, 2007
Stefan Schwarzer said:

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 ?


August 15, 2007
Chris Gemignani said:

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

Create a 10x10 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

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