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A Side Note: Why I dislike XY Scatter Charts so much! by Howard Clark

October 3rd, 2007 · No Comments · Uncategorized

Honestly, there isn’t anything wrong with the Scatter Chart in and of itself.  It just wants a little respect versus its cousin the line chart.  I’m making the line chart a cousin, maybe even distant to drive home the point that while they are both in the same family they have completely different operating parameters.  What happens is that Scatter Charts are misunderstood and misapplied.  I was going to go on this long diatribe about what’s what and then I decided to lean on my friends at Microsoft since for most of us Excel is the tool of choice for data visualization.  Hundreds of data visualization packages and we’re doing imports into Excel, got to love the power of the swamis at Microsoft, oh what a spell they weave.  In any case here is the link.

 Creating XY (Scatter) and Line charts

My final thought is this, if you are looking at data points over a very linear period of measure like, oh, TIME.  Use a Line Chart, unless you have a thing for lots of little dots.

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