School > INFO 424 > Lab 1
Summery
This lab was a survey of the information visualization tools present in the various applications in the Microsoft office suite. We were to create interesting charts and graphs of the data we were provided using excel, PowerPoint, access, and then using conditional formatting to highlight interesting data in excel.
The general purpose here was to get us used to the process of creating information visualizations, give us a sense of some of the types of commonly used formats that exist, and introduce us to some of the benefits and limitations of the office suite in this area.
Excel
Here I plotted the yearly incomes of people with different professions for various educational institutions. This particular display allows easy comparison which institutions pay best, as well as which professions earn more.
PowerPoint
In this display I tried to show the relative pay rates for public and private educational institutions. I was most interested in showing how far from even they were, and would have preferred to show only the distance from the center rather than from the edges.
Access
In this graph I tried to highlight the difference in incomes of men and women in various settings. I think that this does a decent job of showing which institutions are closest together and which have the greatest income gap.
Conditional Formatting
Here I used conditional formatting to highlight the column with the highest value in each row. We can see with this that women in 2-year private institutions earn more then men.
Lessons Learned
I found that the tools present in excel, powerpoint, and access were very similar. They seemed to rely on a single shared implementation. While some portions of the user interface were not always accessible, for the most part the options available to us in each program were the same - or at least very similar.
One other interesting thing I noticed was that almost all of the customization options for any graphic were focused entirely on presentation issues, things like changing colors and fonts. These options were nice, but many of them did little to really enhance the usefulness of a given graph. I found myself wishing I had extra options, and in the case of the access visualization I actually ended up adding the legend in photoshop.