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Showing posts with the label Better Charts
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  Recently I saw some Travel facts and figures for the Lunar New Year 2023 . The table for the Top Five Destinations (see above) was interesting but difficult to digest. Would it be possible to summarise this? Would it be possible to make this table more comprehensible at a glance? It may mean turning this table into some form of a diagram. A network diagram or Sankey diagram would probably do the job. But what if Excel was the only that I had? This would be challenging. Converting Table Information into Data Table above presents nominal data. There are a number of options to convert it into numerical data. Using Excel, it was easy to auto-calculate a count of the mentioned countries. Frequency is the number of times the country is mentioned in the Table. A simple COUNTIF  formula gave the results instantly. The Ranked is a weighted preference of destination. I put an arbitrary weightage of 5, 4, .., 1 for Top 1, Top 2, ..., Top 5 in reverse order respectively. As an example, if Thai

Better Charts

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Summary: December sale expected to stay above 60,000 units for the 5th consecutive month. A flattish  quarter-on-quarter in the 4th quarter is expected. Analysts forecast a lower sale in 2023. A recent news report showed a chart on vehicle sales. I reproduced the chart above and thought of improving it. As I am not an analyst in the transportation, I will refrain from making comments and stick only to improving the chart. At first glance, the chart is cluttered and it was hard to see where the story was getting at. I was also unconvinced with the 3 summary points to the right of the chart, as the graphs do not bring the points out. The first thing I did was declutter the chart by switching to line graphs instead. I kept the original author's intention to show a month-on-month view. I did not show the data points as it makes the chart untidy. I also reduced the vertical axis granularity. The covered range becomes clearer. To bring out the poin