Uncovering Data Trends with Excel Charts
My MIS 320 Business Decisions class just took their mid-term exams. Much of it involved your typical advanced Excel calculations, conditional logic, and forecasts. Certainly hard enough, but really pretty standard stuff. One question however involved "making sense" of a collection of data regarding travel to and from the state of Indiana. The requirement was to create a series of charts that would interpret the data for Indiana business leaders, politicians, state and local governments, and average citizens. On the surface, this appeared simple--after all how hard could graphs be? The challenge was that the data was a “mess” and students had to dig deep in order to uncover useful information. They also were encouraged to experiment with color, 3-D effects, and styles. Some of the more interesting graphs are shown here... Eric Sheppard used a "Pie within a Pie Chart" to breakout the "Other" category regarding means of trasportation in Indiana. This i...
