week, in response to my post on charting, Harlan pointed at a number of Economist charts as examples of expert charts. Today, I spent just a few minutes with Excel 2007 trying to create a similar chart. I thought I would share the results. chart in question is located here. It is a line chart with a title and some series labels. Here is a screen shot. The Economist web site start with in Excel, I typed in the data (source: The Economist web site) and inserted a line chart … to enlarge) is what you will see in the beta build when you insert a line chart. to enlarge) you can see, the Excel chart looks similar in composition with respect to good charting technique – there are no graphic effects,
microsoft office Professional 2010 product key, and the data is emphasized,
office pro plus 2010 64 bit, axes, tick marks, and gridlines have been subdued to allow the data in the plot area to stand out more. Next, I decided to fiddle around with a few settings to see how hard it would be to get things closer. A few clicks to add a title, change where the vertical axis is, and resize the chart a bit and I had something looking very close. to enlarge) one major difference is that the legend is outside the chart, and in the chart plot area next to each series. Again with several more clicks,
windows 7 pro product key, I removed the legend from the chart and added two text boxes (“OECD” and “Germany”) and positioned them near the appropriate data series. With just a few more clicks,
office 2007 Enterprise serial key, I have something very close. to enlarge) point I am trying to get across here is that our default styles (and many of the other styles we include in Excel) are, I believe, what a lot of people are looking for with respect to “professional” and “effective”. (I know there are features that would make the above easier, and like I said in the previous publish, we are planning to continue to work in that area going forward.) Here is what the same chart looks like when turned into a bar chart … again, the focus is on clarity of data. to enlarge) that’s it for today. Download the beta, try the styles, and let us know. As always,
genuine microsoft office 2007 Pro Plus, feedback welcome.