Work

Why You Shouldn’t Trust Pyramid Charts

Lifehacker AU

Pyramid charts look a lot more attractive than bar graphs, which presumably explains why Office’s charting option includes so many of them. However, their visual appeal shouldn’t blind you to the fact that they often misrepresent data.


March 5, 2010
Work

Look At Data Like A Statistician, Minus The Ph. D

Nathan Yau is a doctoral candidate in statistics, but the most valuable lessons he’s learned in analysing and working with data don’t involve formal maths. Here’s how he suggests looking at lines, charts and numbers to find interesting things.


January 19, 2010
Fix

Yawnlog Tracks Your Sleep Habits, Helps You Pinpoint Problems

Sometimes the best way to find behaviour patterns is to plot them out on a graph. Yawnlog helps identify your sleep problems by displaying your snooze data in chart-form.


January 5, 2010
Design

Cacoo Makes Diagram Creation And Collaboration Simple

If you need to make diagrams, wire frames, network charts and more but you don’t have much experience with graphic design, Cacoo makes chart creation as simple as drag and drop.


November 14, 2009
Communicate

Apostrophe.me Ends Your Apostrophe Ponderings

If you’ve ever paused mid-stroke and thought “Does this need an apostrophe?” you’ll want to take a peek at the apostrophe-use flowchart at Apostrophe.me for a cartoon-driven refresher.


November 12, 2009
Organise

Disciplanner Makes Tracking And Assessing Your Goals Simple

If you’re interested in tracking your goals and habits in the long term but you’re not so interested in messing around with overly complicated tracking schemes and tools, Disciplanner is a simple and easy to configure tracking tool.


October 6, 2009
Fix

iSleepDiary Tracks Your Sleep Patterns And Quality

If you’ve been waking up feeling like you might have been fighting off a zombie horde in your sleep, it might be time to start tracking your sleep patterns to get to the bottom of things.


September 4, 2009
Work

Google Docs Beefs Up Its Response-Gathering Forms

If you like your Google Docs enough to use them as a public or semi-private polling tool, Google has added a grid-style question selection form, made the results charts cleaner and prettier, and now allows form owners to pre-populate fields with example data, along with adding bi-direcitonal language support. Know of a great use for Google Docs’ forms? Tell us in the comments. [Official Google Docs Blog]


September 2, 2009
Fix

Computer Repair Flowchart Troubleshoots Hardware Problems

We recently showed you a fun (but accurate) tech support cheat sheet courtesy of popular web comic xkcd. If hardware is more your problem, this series of interactive charts can help you troubleshoot some common hardware problems.


August 28, 2009
Design

When To Use Bar Charts Instead Of Pie Charts

Pie charts look cooler than other kinds of charts. They’re based on pie, after all, and seem less accountant-like than bars, bubbles and lines. They are, however, often a very wrong way to represent subtle but important differences.