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Thoughts on the user experience: Apple vs Blackberry

I have recently started using a Blackberry on Verizon wireless – I was amazed at the experience shock (kind of like culture shock) I had. You take an iPhone out of the pack and it just works, no user manual needed. You take the Blackberry out (and I think most of the blame lies with …

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Scott Brown’s Funding

Republican Scott Brown scored a big upset when he won the senate race in Massachusetts to replace the late Teddy Kennedy. I was looking at data about funding sources and thought this would be interesting to visualize. I was surprised by the amount of out of state contributions. It will be interesting to follow Mr. Brown’s progress as …

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PowerPivot: A video introduction from MrExcel

Bill Jelen, aka MrExcel has written the first book on Microsoft’s new PowerPivot. PowerPivot is a the Office 2010 solution to link Excel to millions of rows of data held on databases or large text files. PowerPivot will ensure that Excel remains a useful, and perhaps even more serious, dashboard tool. I found this video …

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If your sales dashboard tells you that sales are down, but not why, you don’t have a dashboard

I tweeted the following a while back: If your sales dashboard tells you that sales are down, but not why, you don’t have a dashboard It’s worth expanding on this a little more than the 140 characters allowed on Twitter.  What do I mean by this? Simply, if  your dashboard shows key performance indicators, or …

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Using Google Chart API to create dashboards and sparklines

A few posts back I talked about using a plugin to the jquery javascript library to create sparklines in blog posts. One of my readers suggested using Google’s chart api to instead create the sparklines. From Google: What is the Google Chart API? The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts with a URL …

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Who did we declare independence from again?

The fourth of July is Independence Day in the US. 1,004 US residents were asked who independence was declared from. The results? A little concerning, shall we say. Here’s the response via a Tableau dashboard. Dashboard 1

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Augmented (hyper)Reality

You’re kidding yourself if this won’t be reality one day. Too. Much. Going. On. Need. A. Cup. Of. Tea.

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics needs help

This administration is doing a good job of opening data up to the American public – from the creation of data.gov to the appointment of Edward Tufte to the Whitehouse advisory panel for improving the display of information on recovery.gov. Other government institutions though have a way to go. In this post I’m going to pick on the …

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American Time Use Survey – How the WSJ could do better

I recently posted about how the Wall Street Journal’s graphical  interpretation of the American Time Use Survey left something to be desired. Their choice of both multiple pie charts and stacked bars with too many segments made comparisons difficult. The time use survey is essentially “how does the average American spend their day” with categories …

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Wall Street Journal a way off New York Times standard..

It would seem that the Wall Street Journal has a way to go before approaching the data visualization excellence of the New York Times. The above data are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey. The pie chart is broken for the usual reasons – 3D, too many segments, have to refer …

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