Andreas Lipphardt informed me that BonaVista Systems (or should we now say XLCubed?) are running an Excel dashboard competition. Participants can win an iPhone, a data visualization workshop or one of Stephen Few’s books.
Archive for the ‘Data Visualization’ Category
Excel dashboard competition
May 1, 2008XLCubed acquires BonaVista Systems, publisher of MicroCharts
August 14, 2007Now this is interesting. Not only do the XLCubed and MicroCharts Excel add-ins work much better together today than when I originally wrote about combining them, but the publisher of the former has actually acquired the publisher of the latter. This is extracted from the message that went out to MicroCharts users:
Linking XLCubed with MicroCharts connects Dashboards direct to the data and makes them dynamic. It also makes them easier to build as the OLAP Cube can also store the control information for the dashboard as well as the data.
This sounds promising, particularly if microcharts are made available within XLCbubed grids. Formula-mode integration is perfect for dashboard-style reporting but remains limited for dynamically exploring data. More on all this when I’ve had a chance to actually try the “integrated” version.
Choosing Colors for Data Visualization
January 7, 2007Going through the bookmarks that have accumulated over the last months without further processing on my part, I stumbled upon this article where Maureen Stone summarizes a few key ideas about choosing colors for representing data visually. It’s a year old but the principles it teaches are timeless:-)
This page listing articles by Stephen Few (author of Information Dashboard Design) might also interest you if you’re into this kind of thing.
Should a dashboard provide quick answers or prompt for more questions?
November 1, 2006A recent article at Joining Dots compares traditional KPI displays (value, colored indicator, trend arrow) to spark lines and bullet graphs. The auther has a point when he says:
The irony is, dashboards that provide quick answers are largely redundant any way. Quick answers are answers you already know and just want validated.
As suggested in the article, a sparkline is fairly easy to build. Should you like to experiment with bullet graphs, however, ExcelUser has a great tutorial. You may also want to download and try an add-in such as MicroCharts 1.0 which does sparklines, bullet graphs and more.
The only complaint I have about MicroCharts is that it interacts in some strange ways with other add-ins such as XLCubed – which I use daily. Other than that, it looks very nicely implemented.
