To tell you the truth, I don’t like the word “lie”: it feels obvious and unsophisticated. I prefer something like “reframing truth”, “alternative facts” or an English word I recently discovered, “paltering” (lying with the truth). Wanting to improve my skills in that area, I had great expectations about Alberto Cairo’s most recent book, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information where he discusses this topic at length. Well, after reading it, my dark side found the book incredibly boring. The intellectual satisfaction of learning new and mischievous ways of deceiving others is ju ..read more

My presentation at NTTS 2017 is titled An evaluation of data visualization practices of statistical institutes. I’m writing this post to share a few ideas with people not familiar with my work. Some of these ideas require context, and I will not be able to provide it within the 15-minute allocation time. I’ll update the post if there are questions I’m unable to answer during the session. Core message When we have a small table, it’s OK to use hard numbers to communicate, and perhaps we can use a chart or two to illustrate them. When our table grows, we have to shift our analysis and communicat ..read more

My presentation at NTTS 2017 is titled An evaluation of data visualization practices of statistical institutes. I’m writing this post to share a few ideas with people not familiar with my work. Some of these ideas require context, and I will not be able to provide it within the 15-minute allocation time. I’ll update the post if there are questions I’m unable to answer during the session. Core message When we have a small table, it’s OK to use hard numbers to communicate, and perhaps we can use a chart or two to illustrate them. When our table grows, we have to shift our analysis and communicat ..read more

To tell you the truth, I don’t like the word “lie”: it feels obvious and unsophisticated. I prefer something like “reframing truth”, “alternative facts” or an English world I recently discovered, “paltering” (lying with the truth). Wanting to improve my skills in that area, I had great expectations about Alberto Cairo’s most recent book, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information where he discusses this topic at length. Well, after reading it, my dark side found the book incredibly boring. The intellectual satisfaction of learning new and mischievous ways of deceiving others is j ..read more

I’m still in shock. Such a stupid Excel mistake. I should know better, but it was Monday, so… Let me tell you about it. It’s as mistake as old as the hills, but it never goes away, and you are not immune to it. I’ll exemplify with a simple data set. Here is a list of counties by state in the US (the data source), then the number of counties by state and finally the states sorted by number of counties: I couldn’t use a pivot table, so I had to count them with the COUNTIF() function. Then the states are sorted by the number of counties. Here is the formula I’m using, a typical COUNTIF() fu ..read more

I’ve been working on a series of short, focused and practical data visualization courses that will be published on wisevis.com, my consulting firm’s site. The plan is to add two new courses each month (minimum), update and move my current dashboard courses and convert my e-books to the online course format. There will be free and paid content. Course for fun: How to make a pie chart I couldn’t resist the temptation of creating a course on How to make a pie chart as a “Hello World!” message. It’s free, so you don’t even need to enroll. Although it is free and about pie charts, this ..read more