Scatterplot Graphs
For historical data in multiple dimensions.
Line Graphs
Data accumulated over time.
Tabular Data to Line Graphs
One of my modus apparandi was to always try and fit the most data into the least space. The data we displayed at my old job wasn't our main message, and I needed to treat it as a sidebar item. It had to be compact, interesting, and intuitive.
One example-slash-problem was corporate bond spread data provided by one of the members. The dimensions that were available were:
- Market Sector (e.g., industrial, bank)
- Term (10-year, 30-year, etc.)
- Spread
- Change, up or down
- Current value and historical trend
Which is quite a lot to fit into a 200 pixel-wide square. Here's the working example:
The stylesheets for the Data have been removed from the sifma.org host server. A further issue was, this data was only deliverable in an e-mail drop once a week. So maintenance on support were going to be an issue. The best solution was to drop the e-mail message as text into a directory, and write a script to pull up the latest, format it and display it, and read the others x-weeks back and draw the appropriate graph. As shown here, the table was shown as in an i-frame, with links to flip the various graphs and tables in the same space.
Other Uses
Any kind of data that needs a compact historical representation of one field, while displaying more detailed current values across different kinds.
For example, let's see, the height and weight of various kids in your class. Kate, Walt, Michael, Jack, Anna and Libby have their own growth histories, and their own current height. If you measure them every three months, each will have grown a different amount in that time.
The columns would be "name," "height" and "weight." Each student's row would have their current height and weight, along with the change. You could zero in on a particular student, then flip back to the table again. You could also have boys and girls sections. If all this has you lost, drop me a line.