visual analysis

Finally, a good place for pie charts

November 14, 2008

The junk food of data visualization has found a home. Pie charts show up everywhere, just like trans fats. Visual analysis expert Stephen Few condemns them, and I’ll bet Tableau Software designers held their noses the day they added pie-chart templates.

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Radical BI

July 28, 2008

Blogger Nicholas Goodman writes that Tableau’s visual analysis tool is not actually radical or revolutionary. He trivializes it as if it were a Coke machine with a cool new button. For now, let’s not quibble about the meaning of radical, revolutionary, or button. Let’s not worry about the title of Nicholas’s post, “Sexy vs. experience,” [...]

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Tableau is the new Apple

July 22, 2008

It’s hard to watch Tableau Software CEO Christian Chabot and Tableau visual-analysis demos and not think of Steve Jobs and Mac OS X. Chabot has the same bright stage presence, and his product has the same simplicity and elegance. Like Mac, Tableau makes you love it. In Monday’s keynote, Chabot couldn’t pace. The conference’s overflow [...]

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User conference with a view

July 20, 2008

I often have to suppress a question while I listen to pitches for BI “solutions.” I want to interrupt and ask, “Hey, isn’t most of what you’re saying just bullshit?” I’ve found an exception. That voice didn’t even make a peep Sunday as the three-day Tableau Software user conference unfurled in Seattle. Last night at [...]

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Alex Vollmer’s review of election day infographics

February 7, 2008

Be sure you don’t miss Alex Vollmer’s excellent review of election day infographics. He wanted to see the margins of victory, percentage of precincts reporting, number of delegates at stake, and other goals. He looked at the New York Times online, CNN, National Public Radio and other media.

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Throwing light on a power company’s data

January 14, 2008

I guess even the guys who live and breathe data get lost in it sometimes. At one power company that enlisted the help of Houston-area Visual Numerics, there was so much data that no one knew how to start pulling it apart. Only when company analysts saw it visualized did they know what questions to [...]

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Wall Street Journal tag clouds compare Romney and JFK

December 6, 2007

Today’s Wall Street Journal Online uses tag clouds—the first I’ve seen on that site—to compare Mitt Romney’s statement on religion with John F. Kennedy’s statement in the fall of 1960 as he ran for president. It’s great to see the Wall Street Journal getting into information visualization (a.k.a. “infovis” among aficionados). No big story has [...]

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Visualization of another kind makes CO2 visible

December 3, 2007

It’s not the kind of visualization we’ve been talking about, but it works. This brief video on YouTube makes carbon dioxide more than visible. The CO2 becomes scary.

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