Apple π

Look at how different media organizations have used graphics/graphs to illustrate the news.
Poynter Online:
The Art of Explanation


While Edward Tufte has concerns about representing data accurately in charts, he does, use pictures to demonstrate relationships.
(See Edward Tufte)

If you would like to try your hand, here are some links that will help to spice up your condiment report.

PC Magazine:
Add Images to Excel Projects

MacWorld:
Excel Chart Art

Andy Pope:
Dividing a graphic into sections

Excel 2007 has a great graphic look for charts, but these links still work



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Labels: Charts

Ways to look closer

Professional statisticians typically have powerful software at their disposal to perform advanced analyses and create slick graphs. But many professionals in the quality field don't enjoy that luxury.

Faced with a limited budget, they must be resourceful with the software they already have. Besides, not everyone needs the capability to perform nonlinear regression with custom loss functions for maximum likelihood!

Fortunately, many occasional data analysts already own a versatile software capable of providing most basic quality analyses -- Microsoft Excel.

• Shewhart control charts
  
  
• Pareto charts
  
  
• Simple box-and-whisker plots

Labels: Charts

Fill in the spaces

"If the datasheet data for the category axis contains date number formatting, Microsoft Graph automatically uses a special type of axis in your chart called a time-scale axis.
A time-scale axis shows a blank category for dates for which you have no data. If you do not want to see these gaps — for example, if you have data for 1-Jan, 15-Jan, 3-Feb, 12-Feb, and 2-Mar, and you want to plot the days next to each other - you can change the time-scale axis to a standard category axis.
On the Chart menu, click Chart Options, click the Axes tab, and then click Category under Category (X) axis."

Labels: Charts