
Excel 2013 print preview shows ghost image series#
I used a Ghost Series to ensure the axis scale is the same on each chart.xlsx file please ensure your browser doesn't change the file extension on download. In sum, a designer should strive to capitalize on our hard-wired perceptual capabilities whenever possible.”ĭownload the Excel Workbook. How many times have you mistakenly seen blue as orange? Probably never, even if you are a dichromate. How many times have you misread a word? Probably often.

These activities are relatively slow, error-prone, require mental resources and effort and take learning.

By thinking, I mean reading text, attaching meaning to an icon, searching memory, etc. On the other hand, thinking is a relatively recent evolutionary advance, and we are not yet very good at it. As a result, color perception is fast, accurate, automatic, and effortless. With several hundred million years of evolution behind us, color perception is deeply wired into our fabric. The Power of Color “ A good design will use color to save the viewer from thinking too much. Generally the bin sizes should be equal, but since the values are percentages of a population, as opposed to absolute values, it is ok to have different size bins. Note: you may have noticed that the age bands are different sizes. The columns are already sorted from largest to smallest, I don’t also need different colors for each column. The gratuitous use of color has distracted me from the message, wasting my time for no good reason.
Excel 2013 print preview shows ghost image code#
The scale for each chart starts and finishes at the same point so the columns can be fairly compared.īut what do the column colors represent? My initial thought was that they would color code the different reasons, allowing me to quickly find the same reason in each age band.Ĭolor can also be used to draw attention, but the largest and smallest columns both use strong bold colors, so that doesn’t appear to be the motivation here either.Īfter some time I realised that the colors simply match the column order. The columns are sorted from largest to smallest allowing us to quickly see the reasons for hospitalisation in order for each age band. There’s something fundamentally wrong with this chart.
