Charting Guidelines

We hate ugly. 0.0376% more than you do. And in our aim to make the world more delightful, or at least a tiny little corner of it, we proudly present to you the FusionCharts Clinic. Bring in the dark spots, rashes, weight problems or the self-confidence issues your dashboard has, and we will cure it for you. Starting this month, we will pick one dashboard every month and give it the FusionCharts Clinic treatment.

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Your users are becoming busier by the day. Your charts are packing in more info, and are becoming denser by the day. As a result, if users need more than a few seconds to grasp the significance of the data plots, we’ve lost the game. We need to provide the meta information in a concise manner to enable at-a-glance comprehension. This is where the chart caption comes into focus. It occupies a very prominent place in a chart, and a well-written caption makes a chart much easier to comprehend by an order of magnitude. In this post let us review a few tips in writing concise and telling captions.
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A guide to the Heat Map Chart

August 11, 2011 Charting Guidelines
A guide to the Heat Map Chart

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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What you can learn about reporting from Google Analytics

June 22, 2011 Charting Guidelines
What you can learn about reporting from Google Analytics

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…

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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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