How timely. Last week I wrote about choosing the right chart. Juice Analytics recently created an interactive Chart Chooser, based on Andrew Abela’s original Chart Chooser decision chart (via FlowingData). Both tools are excellent and offer a great start to choosing the right chart/graph format for data. The interactive chart offers little in terms of best practices (it wasn’t designed to do that) but helpfully separates out different chart types by the data that you have (quantity, comparison, distribution, etc.). And the best part of the interactive is that it provides you with downloadable templates for both Excel and Powerpoint. I’ll try this and might write about how well it works for me in a business setting.
I actually like Andrew’s original (static) chart a little better, as I find the flow diagram does a nicer job of providing context for the decision-making process.
Put both of these things together and you’re off to a good start.
[UPDATE]: Read Naomi Robbin’s (Forbes) excellent counterpoint to the chart-by-menu mentality.
