(This article was originally published at Effective Graphs, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
In Visualizing the Table of the Graph Makeover Contest I said, “I’d be happy to post before and after figures if any of you want to redo your entries with the suggestions that the other reviewers and I made.” Carlos Ortega took me up on my offer. Figure 1 shows his original figure and Figure 2 his redrawn one.
There are a number of improvements in Figure 2: The variables are ordered by size, it is more obvious that the labels on the horizontal axis refer to both figures, the redundant homeowners and renter labels are no longer needed, and the tick marks and their labels are treated consistently in the two figures. It is very clear from Figure 2 that the largest change comes from the category with the smallest expenditure: a fact that is lost in Figure 1. We would still like to see these figures in horizontal bar charts rather than vertical ones so that the labels could be read more easily.
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