In this video we will learn the importance of drawing a clean graph and how to avoid clutter in our
graphs.
So consider this scenario our friend Tom is head of the technical team the technical team in that company
is providing support for technical issues that the employees face.
So his team receives ideal later tickets or issues and those issues are solved by his team.
A few months back some of the members of his team have left their team and duty which is suffering from
being short staffed not don't want to show the trend of incoming delegates and the process to get over
months to make his case that he needs additional staff and budget should be allocated to his team to
hand what people
so he gathers the data of ticket volume received and ticket volume processed and plotted over the twelve
months.
And this quick graph.
This is a graph which I told you can be drawn in a single click.
Take some time and identify the things that you can do to reduce clutter in this graph so that this
graph is more clear and easy to understand.
So here's how we should draw it.
I tell you some points to help you reduce declare that in note charts.
The first thing you're going to do is removing the chart border.
Whenever we draw a chart in excel by default that is a chart border.
I also told you how to draw a dart border but usually to keep the chart clean it is preferable that
we do not have a dart border and blank white spaces are used to segregate jobs from the other information
available in the PPD.
So first thing is removing charred border.
Second option is to remove degrade lanes since in this scenario the aim is not to highlight exact numbers.
We can do over with good length but whenever we want to highlight the exact numbers we can use grid
lines and data labels also.
So in this particular scenario since we just want to highlight that there is a difference between received
and processed ticket we do not need to use grid lanes.
So that's why we have removed the grid length from this chart.
Third thing we did is we removed the markers have again sent individual data point or data value is
not important in this graph.
We want to highlight that there is a difference only so that additional thing is also removed since
it is not complementing the actual message that we want to convey.
So we have removed those data markers also the fourth thing that we have done is head you can see that
X axis labels.
January February March.
That is the complete name of the month head.
We have used a sharp form of those month names.
There are several reasons that showing the month names like this is more profitable than showing a month
name like this.
First of all the month name shown here are dated which is a little difficult to read and takes extra
effort on part of audience to identify which month is represented at which point.
Secondly if you use short funds also you can still clearly make out.
What is this Jan representing.
Or did this February presenting.
So there is no loss of information that totally.
It is definitely clutter free and you can see that it is not looking good but when I put it like this
the graph is looking definitely better.
The fifth point is that here we had two lines.
One is a blue line and one is the red line and we have highlighted that blue line to present to get
volume received and red line indicates to get volume processed although it is giving us the information
about the two data series.
But if we directly label lead to data cities that is the label of the data as it is is near the data
it is plus the color used for that data series is the same as the color used for labeling it.
It is easy for the audience to process that this data as it is is for the records received and this
data series is for data gets processed so all the data legions at the bottom were also serving the purpose
of identifying which data it is belong to the cities it is preferable that we put the names of the cities
nearby and in the same color and format.
So the point behind discussing this scenario is that whenever we draw a graph we should always try to
reduce clutter and focus only on the message that we want to convey.