You can make a nice graph in Excel

This is not meant to be turning into a Microsoft bashing string here, but just by coincidence I came across this fantastic tutorial screencast on how to recreate one of the NY Times typically excellent graphs in Excel. I’m no Excel jockey (I work with a few luckily), so I learned quite a bit here. Usually I hand re-create charts based on Excel data just because I’ve been so turned off by Excel’s default maroon, blue and gray chart color scheme (who ever decided on that as the default? perhaps it was their alma mater colors?), which I know is stupidly inefficient but I’ve found it to be less blood pressure raising. In the future I’ll have to give Excel more effort.

View the screencast

Tip of the hat to Xblog