Chart Tamer
No other software comes close to Microsoft Excel in popularity for analyzing and presenting quantitative information. The charts in Excel, which provide Excel’s visual analysis and presentation functionality, however, are confusing, inadequate, and sometimes poorly designed. In some respects this problem actually increased with the release of Excel 2007, because it did little for charts other than add superficial dazzle—visual effects that actually undermine a chart’s ability to display information effectively.
Chart Tamer attempts to align Excel’s charts with the best practices of data visualization, as taught in the book Show Me the Numbers by Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge. It tames Excel’s charts, which seem to exhibit Microsoft’s belief that “more is better”, by bringing them into line with the data presentation philosophy that “simple is better.” We don’t need more choices—we need a few good choices that really work.
What Chart Tamer Does
Chart Tamer improves the charts that we produce with Excel in the following ways:
- It limits the list of available charts to the few that are most useful, thereby reducing the complexity of choosing an appropriate chart
- It provides a simple new interface for selecting an appropriate chart, which guides us to the right selection when help is needed without bogging us down when it’s not
- It adds three useful charts that aren’t currently available in Excel: dot plots, strip plots, and box plots
- It revises the formatting defaults of Excel’s charts so that no extra work is necessary to create charts that work effectively
- It provides colors for use in charts and elsewhere that were designed to work especially for data presentation
- It allows us to quickly and easily improve old charts that were created prior to Chart Tamer
When we use Chart Tamer to create a new chart, the following dialog box makes it easy to choose the most appropriate chart:
The Chart Defaults dialog box allows changing the chart defaults of data objects (bars, lines, etc.) and of non-data objects (axes, grid lines, etc.):
The Chart Tamer Color Picker is used whenever colors need to be assigned to
something in Excel:
For an introduction into Chart Tamer and Chart Tamer concepts read:
