Blog post

Nothing wrong with manual charts

November 24, 2011 ยท by Jan Schultink
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Automated charting is great if you want to analyze data quickly; grab an excel table and turn it into a chart with one click.

It is different in presentation design though. When you generate a chart in PowerPoint, the colors are off, there are ugly tick marks, the labels do not look right. In most cases, I create the chart almost entirely by hand. The only thing that PowerPoint does is generate the actual bars or columns, the rest is put on by me as text labels in the right place.

Usually a presentation only contains a few very important data charts, and they deserve the time to get them absolutely right.

Data visualizationPowerPointPresentation design

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5 comments

Anonymous2011-11-24 11:21:23
Jan, don't you use Thinkcell then? Thinkcell is an application within powerpoint that lets you design graphs the way you want.
Titus Tielens
Jan Schultink2011-11-24 13:33:24
I am probably a control freak...
Jan Schultink2011-11-27 07:16:56
I will post examples in future blog posts
Anonymous2011-11-24 23:27:18
Hello Jan,
Would you be able to show us some examples?
thanks
Marg
Andrew Marritt2011-11-25 13:27:20
On the Mac I find OmniGraphSketcher a great help. You can free-sketch graphs or use small data sets. Formatting uses things such as the Mac Colour picker and the app gives you great control of axis, points, bars etc.

We use it to wireframe dashboards (with OmniGraffle) and it's a huge time saver.