Well-formed Data – Part 4: Missing Data

How often do you get data that needs to be charted or graphed only to find out some of the data’s missing?  We see it all the time.  However, just because it’s missing, doesn’t mean you can ignore it.  You need to know how to make it consistent, how to deal with it if it [...]

Well-formed Data – Part 3: Normalization

Our lives are made up almost exclusively of relationships and that includes data.  In fact, it’s hard to think of examples of data that doesn’t involve a relationship.  Customers (hopefully) have many Orders.  Companies have multiple employees.  People (hopefully) have multiple friends, who also have multiple friends, and may even share some of each others [...]

Well-formed Data – Part 2: Concatenation & Extraction

Continuing our series on preparing data for analysis & visualization, we’ve just released the next video on concatenation and extraction.  The ability to break data apart and put it back together in new ways is essential to preparing data.  By storing data at the lowest sensible level, it can be used separately or combined with [...]

Well-formed Data – Part 1: Consistency

Data visualization and analysis are powerful tools for discovering and communicating stories held in your data.  However, before most of today’s data visualization tools can be used effectively, the data must be cleaned, organized and prepared.  Over the next 4 videos, I’ll be discussing how to prepare your data to be visualized.  The first step in [...]

Interactive Area Charts in Excel

In a recent post by Nathan from FlowingData, he does a great job of explaining how to interactive area charts.   For the average person, though, his approach requires a lot of existing knowledge…Flash, Flex, coding, etc.  So, I wanted to create a version that most people could create and use with NO coding required.  For [...]