As business people and marketers, we traffic in data. It’s what we use to make decisions (even gut decisions). Data is also how we communicate the status of things and how we make the case for change.

One option for sharing reports with your team is to simply rattle off numbers. Think something like this: "We allocated 10% of operating budget to maintenance, 15% to hardware upgrades, 18% to ...

Pie charts help people display complex data in a colorful, organized and compact way. Microsoft Word comes with several pie charts that you can fill with data manually. Manual data entry is fine, but ...

Most Excel chart types are overkill, and these five prove it.

A data set that occurs frequently consists of the values or the percentage breakdown of several categories for two time periods. A common way of plotting these data is to use a pair of pie charts.

Pie charts are a way to show data. Pie charts show proportions of a whole. The circle of the pie chart represents the whole. That's a full 360 degrees. Each part, or slice, represents part of the ...

What an outstanding group of readers I have! Both the quality and the quantity of entries to the Graph Makeover Contest were amazing. There were 29 entries to the first part of the contest which ...

Choosing the right type of chart helps you display discrete data more effectively. Discrete data consists of whole numbers that are counted rather than measured. For example, when you track items sold ...