As far as designing for efficiency goes - especially for a chart…

This tends to be a tool specific strategy, but in general the basic rules I discussed in the presentation are effective:

1. Abstract the data from the presentation. I tend to use Excel for reporting because of its ubiquity in the business world, so for Excel this means that I keep the data in a seperate worksheet from the report presentation layer (including charts) and leverage tools like named ranges, offset, vlookup, etc. so that once the data has been refreshed in the data sheet, the rest of the report is automatically updated (i.e. I don’t have to update each component that uses the underlying data).

2. Behind that, in the data sheet itself, I use various ways (web queries, pivot tables, etc) to make the data itself a refreshable query.

Again, there are numerous tactics that you can use, many of which are dependent on the platform you are working from, but for efficiency (and your sanity) if you can design the report in such a way that updated data can be pulled/queried through some more or less automated procedure, you’ve won the battle.

It’s important to note that I generally have the luxury (as many of us do) where the data collection is more or less automated and then all we’re doing is querying against a data warehouse, data mart, whatever. In the case of the Death and Taxes chart, I would bet that the author has to compile A LOT of data manually, in which case it’s just going to take a serious manual effort to reproduce/update.

Not all charts are meant to be reproduced on a regular basis (Minard’s is another example, could you imagine if he [somehow - go with me here] had the availability to try and update that chart week-by-week during the campaign? How impossible would that be?)

Ok, long story short…
1. Abstract the data from the presentation
2. Use refreshable queries for updating data
3. Make sure the data is easily available via an automated process - if it’s not weigh the cost/benefit of making it so.
4. If it’s too costly to make the data easily refreshable, weigh the cost/benefit of manual updates
5. If it’s not worth it to manually collect/update the data consider alternative ways (that include points 2 and 3) to approach the same answer. If you can’t do that, then you either have to make the chart a one-off or consider lengthening the lead time (cycle) to each update.

That probably doesn’t answer your question fully, but as I stated at the beginning, the tactics used for efficiency, more than anything else tend to be platform-specific.

-Clint

The death and taxes chart seems to meet the first two principles easily. However, it looks like the efficiency principle isn’t met (the author is working on the 2007 version now.)

In your presentation you had many slides on Understanding and Action, but only 1 on efficiency.

How do you build efficiency into each chart you create?

Another way of asking this is, what are the top 10 techniques you abuse when building an efficient chart?

Thanks,
Dylan