A little while back I read Edward Tufte's book _The Visual Display of
Quantitative Information_, and was impressed with some of his ideas for
improving the clarity of charts. I have incorporated some of the
philosophy in the book in my own charts, to such an extent that, at work
the other day, I passed a graph on the wall and tutted at how cluttered
and busy it was... then did a double take and realised it was one of my
old designs!
One of Tufte's ideas that is hard to incorporate into Excel as it
currently exists was the Range Scale plot. It's a lot like a
conventional scatter graph, except that instead of the axes meeting,
giving the sometimes misleading impression of an origin, they instead
end "in midair" without ever touching.
For my own amusement I have simulated this using an invisible white
rectangle in the corner of an Excel chart to mask the place where the
axes meet, but I wonder if there's a more elegant way of doing that? I
would really like to see something like that as a User-Defined Custom
Chart Type.
As an added bonus, Tufte proposes making the minimum and maximum values
of the scatterplot data the end points of the axes, and displaying their
values next to the scale. Can this be done?
Finally, does anyone know of any really useful libraries of user-defined
custom chart types I can download?
--
Del Cotter
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