Courses/Computer Science/CPSC 203/CPSC 203 Template/Fall 2009 Teaching Assistants/F09 Thomas Burt/Lab 3

Working With Charts

In this lab we'll be working with Excel's charting engine. There are some important things to keep in mind about Excel 2007 charting features:

• It can be difficult to find specific features, the only sure way is to search the documentation:
  • http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/CH100648161033.aspx
• It's easy to screw up, but undo always works

Visual Design Rubrics

Simple Example

Reference

Just read Edward Tufte. He's done the best job of defining the problem and also has some effective solutions. Try and get a hand on a real copy of these, they have very high production quality for print works.

• Visual Display of Quantitative Information
• Envisioning Information

Bad Chart Examples

http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/bad_charts/

http://lilt.ilstu.edu/gmklass/pos138/datadisplay/badchart.htm

Good Chart Examples

http://lilt.ilstu.edu/gmklass/pos138/datadisplay/sections/goodcharts.htm

http://www.compassgr.com/sites/mark/index.htm

For Lab

Download the Movie Spreadsheet again.

We're going to produce something like this: