![]() See the everything in action:The Cost of Higher Education Basically instead of showing each data point, you’re showing every individual count within a data point. It takes up a lot of space, but sometimes puts things in better perspective. See the Nightingale in action: The original mortality chart from Florence Nightingaleĭesigners like this one a lot when they want to focus on a single data point. The length of radius is used to indicate one thing, usually a count, and polar area represents a portion of the whole. The Nightingale rose graph (or the polar area diagram if you like), coined after its creator, Florence Nightingale, is like a combination of the stacked bar and pie chart. See the Voronoi in action: American Consumers Spend More Money On Cheese than On Computers The argument for the Voronoi is a more robust algorithm that is able to sidestep some of the problems when restricted to rectangles. See the treemap in action: The Google NewsmapĪgain we’re using area to visualize magnitude, except instead of rectangles or wedges, a Voronoi diagram uses polygons. It works especially well if your data has a hierarchical structure with parent nodes, children, etc. The treemap uses the areas of rectangles to show relative proportions. Now we’re getting into more advanced stuff. See the stacked bar in action: New York Times Poll Watch You can also use them as you would a pie chart, and it’s usually a better option because it’s sans angle perception problem. If you have only a few distinct points in time, you can use the stacked bar chart in the same way you use the stacked area (just set the bars vertical). See the stacked area in action: (Baby) NameVoyager You can use it for percentages, where the vertical always adds up to 100 percent, or you can use raw counts if you’re more interested in the peaks and valleys. Use the stacked area chart if you want to show changes over time for several variables. See the donut in action: What Britain Has Eaten the Past Three Decades I personally don’t remember using the donut ever, and can’t think of why I ever would. The same arguments of angles and human perception still apply (probably more so). It’s the same idea as the pie, but with a hole cut out in the middle. Oh yes, it’s pie’s lesser-used cousin, the donut. See the pie in action: What Do You Use to Analyze and/or Visualize Data? Use this only if you’re comparing a few values (like three or less) or if you’re like me, use it for a ton of categories to annoy the BI people every now and then. Together, those represented values, add up to 100 percent. The circle represents the whole, and the size of wedge represents a percentage of that whole. Maybe you want to show poll results or the types of crime over time, or maybe you’re interested in a single percentage. This is a guide to make your decision easier for one particular type of data: proportions. ![]() With all the visualization options out there, it can be hard to figure out what graph or chart suits your data best.
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