1. Ok, so there are actually a few cool features in there. Its still annoying to get used to, though!
    One feature I've found pretty handy recently is the conditional formatting enhancements. They really let you visualise data quickly and easilly. Great stuff.
    There are a wide range of new options that are just a button-press away:
    Here's an example of what I've been using it for:
    Much better than looking at a table of numbers, I'm sure you'll agree!
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  2. There was a nice little chart in the Wall Street Journal yesterday showing clearly how central banks are racing interest rates towards zero.
    (From WSJ via Paul Kedrosky)
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  3. I just got around to reading Science News' article on how Forence Nightingale was a pioneer in using novel and innovative charts to present data. Apparently she went to great lengths to do so in order to convince Queen Victoria of the need for social change. She was worried that without the clear presentation of data in charts, Queen Victoria's eyes would glaze over as she scanned statistics and tables of data.
    Her most famous chart is an enhancement to what we would call a pie chart. It shows the number of deaths each month by their cause.
    Each month is a twelfth of a circle. Months with more deaths are longer, meaning the area of each month shows the number of deaths. You can see that during the first part of the war, the blue wedges (disease) aremuch bigger than the red ones (wounds) or black ones (other causes). After March 1855, when the Sanitary Commission arrived, the blue wedges start becoming dramatically smaller.
    From Science News:
    The conventional way of presenting this information would have been a bar graph, which William Playfair had created a few decades earlier. Nightingale may have preferred the coxcomb graphic to the bar graph because it places the same month in different years in the same position on the circle, allowing for easy comparison across seasons. It also makes for an arresting image. She said her coxcomb graph was designed “to affect thro’ the Eyes what we fail to convey to the public through their word-proof ears.”
    Some argue that a bar graph would have made her point more dramatically, though. One of the peculiarities of Nightingale’s circular presentation is that the deaths are proportional to the area, not the radius. Since the area of a circle is pr2, the area is proportional to the square of the radius rather than to the radius itself. This difference tends to de-emphasize the contrast between the small areas and the large ones. (In an early version of this diagram, Nightingale didn’t catch this distinction and drew the graphic incorrectly, with the radii proportional to the deaths. She quickly corrected her mistake.)
    It seems to have worked. The 830 page report she wrote lead to massive changes in hospitals and by the end of the century, Army mortality was lower than civilian mortality.
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