Introducing Chart Chooser

Find and Download Great-Looking Excel and PowerPoint Charts

Chart Chooser is an online tool that answers two questions we commonly get:

  1. What type of chart should I use to show my data?
  2. How can I make good looking Excel or PowerPoint charts?


Chart Chooser


Chart Chooser is easy:

  1. Check the boxes on the left that best describe your objective
  2. Select the chart that you want to use
  3. Choose from Excel or PowerPoint downloads to get a formatted chart template

A few notes about Chart Chooser:

  • Thanks to Andrew Abela of Extreme Presentations for inspiring Chart Chooser with his “Choosing a Good Chart” post and for working with us to put this tool together.
  • We’ve tried to make the charts both Tufte-compliant (i.e. minimal chart-junk) and visually attractive (thanks to Google for the color scheme).
  • Feel free to suggest other types of charts that you’d like to see in the Chart Chooser. Send an example to chartchooser@juiceanalytics.com.
  • If you’d like a customized version of Chart Chooser for your organization, write us at chartchooser@juiceanalytics.com or call me at 202.251.7750.
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.

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


November 27, 2007
Kelly O'Day said:

This is my 3rd and hopefully final try at getting the link to work.

http://processtrends.com/toc_chart_doctor.htm


December 20, 2007
Stef said:

Hey there, the website is still not visible from Switzerland! Gush....


February 27, 2008
Mike said:

Hi guys!

This is fu&%$ awesome! Thank you very much for this!


February 27, 2008
Tom said:

I love your site and have used several graphs to make myself 'look good' at work. Thanks.
I want to use the Waterfall chart but for the life of me I can not figure out how you remove/hide the color fill from the data points after the first one and leave it in for this one.

Thanks.


April 12, 2008
Priya said:

Hey thanks for this useful site... I was wondering if there is a write up for different type of charts displayed here, as in what type of data or steps / FAQs etc.

If I am missing something here, let me know

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Google Presentations and the Right Tool for the Job

Last week, Google released Presentations to fill out their portfolio of online, collaborative document types (they already offer text documents and spreadsheets). The Google folks were kind enough to include us in a round of beta testing a few weeks back, giving us a chance to preview this application, find bugs, and offer feedback.

If you give Google Presentations a try, you may be struck by its limitations. It doesn't offer much flexibility in creating presentations, especially when compared to Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote. The best you can do is create simple text slides on a few predefined templates. On the other hand, it offers unique capabilities you don't get with desktop applications. In particular, we were impressed with how easy it was to share a presentation live online.

I have started to wonder whether calling Google Presentations a "web-based competitor to PowerPoint" or "a PowerPoint clone" was simplistic and misguided. Lumping together software tools is a natural reaction to long lists of features and techno-terminology. Software vendors don't make it any easier to distinguish the differences when they attempt to convince us that their solution is the complete, do-everything tool to satisfy all your [presentation/data analysis/communication/networking] needs.

So, we assume our software tools fall into neat buckets. We assume the tool we are using today do everything we need "well enough." And we assume any new tool is a direct competitor to what we use. As a result, we are severely limited in what we can achieve.

For a long time, I was a fan and a heavy user of PowerPoint. It did what I needed. Perhaps I told myself that what it did was all I needed. A while ago, I had to break off this exclusive relationship.

Now, I find myself using a bunch of different tools to communicate information. On the one hand, this has made my life more complicated. There are new applications to learn and the hassle of moving documents around. But in other ways, it's easier. I use tools designed for the task at hand. And I have opened up a whole new realm of what is possible in terms of organization, polish, and audience engagement.

The table below shows the activities involved in business presentations. For each activity, I have a rough assessment of how well PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Presentation perform. I also list the current Juice toolset.

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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September 28, 2007
Chris Gemignani said:

I agree that Numbers is a little weird. While the basic charts are pretty good, the inspector-based manipulation is hard to get used to. The good news is an update to Numbers appeared yesterday that is supposed to address performance.


September 28, 2007
Tony Rose said:

I'm not familiar with Numbers. I will say that I almost snapped my mouse in half trying to use Google Spreadsheets and dealing with the delay. Even the slightest lag between key strokes and data entry won't work for me. Call me high-maintenance... We have a long way to go before Excel is overtaken in the corporate world.

What, no Xcelsius in the "juicebox"?


October 2, 2007
GleaM said:

I just heard yesterday the name of a web-based suite called Zoho:

http://www.zoho.com/

For what I did heard and the impression that I got from it (looks very google-like), I think it beats Google suite by far.

Just to add somo other solutions...

Regards.


October 9, 2007
rolo said:

We have set up a 46" LCD to display KPIs, and use powerpoint, but obviously it has not been the best experience.

Can anyone suggest tools for digital signage in corporate offices where a reports and analysis unit has to display, every other day, kpis, tables with data, trendlines, bar charts, etc. But in a professional way and not like a simple power point?.

Thanks in advance!


November 20, 2007
Noah Iliinsky said:

Hi Zach,

I've got to agree on your choice of the Omni tools; they really are best-of-class.

I'm curious about what you mean when you say storyboarding. Typically, I'd think of frames that define phases, with some illustration and supporting text. How does that work in OmniOutliner?

Best, Noah

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Why make 100 charts when one will do?

Charts are a great way to explore data. Here is some American baseball data showing player salaries over a five year period.

Baseball salaries by team over time

Charting this data with a line chart would allow us to see trends in salaries by team. However, when we use Excel’s default chart, we get something that looks like this:

Excel's default multiline chart

That’s quite a mess. It would be a lot easier if we could create one chart for each row.

The OFFSET function is going to help. In its simplest form the OFFSET function works like this:

OFFSET(anchor, rows from anchor, columns from anchor)

That is, OFFSET will start with the anchor cell, go down a number of rows from that anchor and over a number of columns and return the value it finds.

OFFSET function

We can use the OFFSET function to create cells that pull a single row of data out of the table dynamically. We create a new row atop of our data and create a series of OFFSET functions that all rely on a single cell (the big yellow one) for their row offset. So changing one cell will pull different rows of data into our fixed location.

Creating a dynamic row that doesn't move

Now, chart the data that doesn’t move.

Charting the dynamic row

After fixing the chart, we’d like to make it easy to change the value in the big yellow cell.

We can use Excel Forms to build a lightweight user interface. Bring up the Excel forms toolbar by rightclicking on any toolbar and choosing Forms. Place a scrollbar beside the chart.

Excel Forms

Right clicking on the scrollbar allows you to Format Control. Link the control to the cell that is controlling all the row offsets. Now, moving the scrollbar will update the chart.

Chart with scrollbar Selecting Format Control Formatting the scrollbar control

Now, the scrollbar controls the chart. Here is the baseball spreadsheet for you to play with: Baseball_offset.xls Have fun!

On the way to 100 charts

Note: this post is adapted from a presentation I gave at eMetrics 2007 in San Francisco.

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.

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


July 14, 2009
Bill said:

This is truly extraordinary. I will build from this and wow everyone. Thank you for sharing the file.


October 13, 2009
ray said:

great and simply outstanding!!!


October 22, 2009
Tim said:

This is great!! This is such a time saver. One question, how do you auto scale the axis in case you have a very wide range of data. For example in one graph I need a to scale to 200, in the next one I need to scale to 5000.

Thanks and keep up the great work you're doing.


February 26, 2010
Sean said:

It sounds like an amazing concept, however, whilst using Excel 2003. It seems that the 'Control' tab on the 'Format Control...' window is missing. Would you be able to provide a sample excel document so that I could look at the VB code behind the scroll bar? or provide the code on here?

Many thanks!


February 26, 2010
Sean said:

Oops, I didn't see the sample document mid way down the page!

Many thanks!

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The Google Analytics relaunch

Google Analytics has been rebuilt and the result redefines the frontiers of doing analytics on the web. Avinash Kaushik has the definitive early review.

Google Analytics v2

I had the privilege of attending the launch and playing with the early release. Here are a few things I noticed.

  • Speak my language: Google has put a lot of effort into replacing specialized terms with everyday ones. This makes the application usable by a broad base of people and is one way to fight GUI Jock-itis.
  • Speed kills: The interface is easily reconfigurable and fast. I've long argued that interface speed is a substitute for configuration options. I'm curious to play with the tool and get a better sense if this is true.
  • Flex rules: Much of the componentry for viewing data in Google Analytics is built in Adobe Flex. This is similar to Google Finance, and not at all like GMail or Google Reader, which use the GWT. We believe this has profound implications for analytical tools on the web and will dig into this in later posts.
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.

2 comments


May 10, 2007
FM said:

Nice and must say timely review, I've been using Analytics.google.com and found it good, some time.
some time it's not an average site owner would like to look at, i mean you may lost your way through it.

Talking about Speed, it's been major sat back, till the day. however if it's improved in relaunch, it's great.


June 20, 2007
Lynn Cherny said:

I had lunch with a friend recently who told me that the Mindmaps fellow who built the new Google Analytics was just more used to Flex. So it may not be sinister or deep, although I agree with you on the overall benefits of the feel and design :-)

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Analytics Roundup: Late April edition

Population Estimates Data Sets
US census data

Are you generic? / Wilson Miner Live
Wilson Miners post re: Django's generic views

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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Earlier writing