Charting Guidelines

Let’s say you want to go out for an expensive dinner. But since it is expensive, you want to make an informed decision about where to go. So you pick up a set of magazines that review such restaurants. And to help you decide, you plot the ratings in a visual format, say a separate column chart for each magazine.

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If you have ever done anything web, chances are you have heard of Google Analytics. Heck, you would have dived into it and spent countless hours together. It does a great job of pulling out vital stats from the ocean of data that website analytics can be, and presents it to us in an easy-to-understand way. There are some very valuable reporting lessons we can learn from Google Analytics that we will discuss here.
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3 lesser-known usability tips for your charts

April 8, 2011 Charting Guidelines
3 lesser-known usability tips for your charts

In a previous post, we had discussed how to increase the usability of your charts instantly using some simple tips. In this post, I will discuss some lesser-known tips that can enhance the usability of your charts further and help make more sense out of the data plotted on them.

Remove unnecessary precision
If you are…

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5 things you didn’t know you could do with FusionCharts

March 15, 2011 Charting Guidelines
5 things you didn’t know you could do with FusionCharts

FusionCharts is a comprehensive charting solution. With over 90 chart types, numerous reporting capabilities and thousands of attributes, it is sometimes difficult to know everything you can do with FusionCharts. So in this post, I decided to put together an assortment of 5 things including round-edged column charts, interactive legends and the pin feature in the Zoom Line chart that I thought you probably weren’t aware of. Sample them, and…

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5 tips to increase the usability of your charts instantly

March 8, 2011 Charting Guidelines
5 tips to increase the usability of your charts instantly

Usability is a term thrown around a lot these days. And not without good reason. People are getting busier and busier. If they cannot find exactly what they are looking for within seconds, it doesn’t exist for them…no matter whether they are searching for a product on the web, a feature in a tool or information on a website. So in this day and age, your charts just doing the…

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Business tricks they don’t teach at B-Schools – How to report poor performance and get away with it?

March 3, 2011 Charting Guidelines
Business tricks they don’t teach at B-Schools – How to report poor performance and get away with it?

For management executives, the quarterly meeting could be a dream or a nightmare. If you and your department have done well, it is time to thump that chest and declare how you are the best thing since beer. But if your performance figures are not up to the mark, it is time to pick from the 101 reasons to weasel out of a meeting. In this post, I…

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4 things to know to create an intuitive drill-down interface

February 8, 2011 Charting Guidelines
4 things to know to create an intuitive drill-down interface

Drill-down charts are everywhere. They help maximize business information by presenting the data in digestible chunks. While implementing drill-down charts is no rocket science (shameless plug: especially with our first-of-its-type LinkedCharts concept), the interface for using them still has some way to go. Haven’t you ever come across a report where you had no idea that the charts could be drilled down into? Or you drilled down multiple…

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A tip a day – Archive

July 8, 2010 Charting Guidelines
A tip a day – Archive

We shared a charting tip a day all of June on our Twitter handle. The tips covered topics like chart selection, usability guidelines and how to make the most out of FusionCharts. In case you missed out, here are our words of wisdom put together:

Tip 1: Use a column/bar chart for comparing individual values and line/area for overall trend…

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