Palo Community Forum

Has anyone tried to implement the bullet graph / bullet chart invented by Stephen Few? Either as stand-alone chart or in-cell chartlet.


Bullet graph in essence is a combination of a stacked bar chart and a narrower single bar chart with an additional target / comparison marker. It can be either horizontal or vertical. It is a good substitute to the bloaty dials / speedometers and are much more compact and readable compared to dials.

The design specs are here:
http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/m…Design_Spec.pdf

We already have Edward Tuftes' sparklines in the selection of charts. By adding the bullet graph we have a set of best practices visualizations that could clearly set Palo apart from other visualization wannabes. The selection of charts in Palo Web is clearly a copy of what is found in Excel but the latter is famous in breeding ignorance towards good visualization practices.

Also, it would be nice to have an option to filter out all the visual garbage type charts from the chart selector having only the ones that are used by visualization pro-s. The recipe is pretty simple - throw out everything 3D, throw out pie/doughnut charts, substitute speedometers with bullet charts and put everything on one page. For other visualization ideas get Tableau Public and see the chart selection and implementation there.