Correcting Wiki Charts: Throughput Accounting

In one of his earlier posts, Jorge Camoes calls for changing bad charts in Wikipedia. Therein, he embeds several examples of charts, which can be easily considered "atrocious". Here, I'll attempt to correct the one titled "Throughput Accounting".

The embedded Wiki chart is a 3D horizontal cylinder chart and contains a long definition of Throughput accounting (T) and its structural components. The definition also includes two equations, T=Sales less TVC and NP=T less OE.

The 3D aspect of the chart serves no special purpose, and the cylindrical shape of the columns with the alternate blue and white bands seems intended for enhanced aesthetics. The columns are arranged without bearing in mind the relationship between the components, and the chart looks somewhat ragged overall.

I replaced the look of the chart from the 3D horizontal cylindrical to a "Waterfall" chart, using stacked columns. I also arranged the columns in reverse order to bring out the relationship between them that dispenses with quoting the two equations mentioned above.

My version of the Throughput Accounting chart is as follows:

Comments

The Cricket Graphs: The Forgotten Chart

The fun of receiving feedback to blog posts is that one isn't quite sure what they might come up against. While mostly it provides fascinating discussions, insightful comments or explanatory questions, there is also the odd occasion when it throws up unusual requests. The other day I received an email in response to my post, The Cricket Graphs . The sender wanted me to create a "Partnership" chart, which would show the runs scored by the pair of batsmen for every wicket and the balls faced. I went searching for data on the Cricinfo website , and picked out the 3rd ODI between the South African and Australian cricket teams which was played out in Kingsmead, Durban on October 28, 2011. The Partnership details were taken from the page titled Partnerships Table and the total balls faced by individual batsmen from the Scorecard. Constructing the graphs was a somewhat tricky affair, with two potential bar charts in two axes representing Balls and Runs, which had me w

Florence Nightingale Circumplex Chart

I was taken to the Florence Nightingale's Wiki page during a recent research, and one of the interesting things I noted was her contribution to statistics. It came to me as a pleasant surprise that she is credited with inventing the polar area diagram , or occasionally the Nightingale rose diagram, which is equivalent to a modern circular histogram. Following the completion of my project and in my weekend to spare, I devoted time to recreating the chart in Excel. It took a combination of Doughnut-Pie-and XY charts and close to four hours to finish it. The colours are a bit darker, the values are approximate and the labels differently oriented, yet the chart looks fairly close to the original as is shown by the picture below.

The Dorling Cartogram

My last project involved using a multitude of regions for drawing analysis, parallels and comparison. Not wanting to use yet another Choropleth graph, I decided to look up alternatives that were easier to create and preferably required no VBA. Soon I stumbled upon "The Dorling Cartogram", defined in the UCSB site as, "This type of cartogram was named after its inventor, Danny Dorling of the University of Leeds. A Dorling cartogram maintains neither shape, topology nor object centroids, though it has proven to be a very effective cartogram method. To create a Dorling cartogram, instead of enlarging or shrinking the objects themselves, the cartographer will replace the objects with a uniform shape, usually a circle, of the appropriate size." I had the data for Obesity in the United States handy, so I decided to give it a try before using it in my project. I opted to use Bubble charts because data points within a series may need to be of varied shapes based on

Somnath's Excel Charts

Search This Blog