In my tiny town on the Washington coast, I don’t get the Wall Street Journal until it arrives in our mail box about noon most weekdays. So at breakfast this morning I read an article in yesterday’s Journal, which offers some great advice for Excel users in business.
Don’t get me wrong. The article, New Light on the Plight of Winter Babies, didn’t discuss Excel at all. Instead, it discussed some fascinating data.
“Study after study,” the article began, “has shown that [babies born in the Winter] test poorly, don’t get as far in school, earn less, are less healthy, and don’t live as long as children born at other times of year. Researchers have spent years documenting the effect and trying to understand it.”
According to the article, the people who first wrote about this phenomenon in 1991 attributed it to how school-attendance laws affect children born at different times of the year. But this article reports that economists Kasey Buckles and Daniel Hungerman at the University of Notre Dame have discovered some surprising new data about this topic. This figure summarizes their findings:
Seasonality figure from the WSJ, which offers lessons for Excel users.
So what does this article have to do with Excel and business data? Here are five Excel-related things that occurred to me:
1. This is a good-looking figure, which you could duplicate almost exactly in Excel. The last chapter of my e-book, Dashboard Reporting With Excel, provides other examples of Excel figures that borrow design ideas from business magazines and newspapers.
2. Notice the Y-axis values. As a general rule, it’s a bad idea to start the minimum Y-axis value at a number other that zero. The reason: Doing so tends to make small variations seem very large; it’s a common method to “lie” with charts. But this is not a problem in this instance, because we’re interested in the fact that a seasonal pattern exists at all, and we care less about its magnitude.
3. The original paper about Winter births was written nearly 20 years ago, but these findings are new. This should remind all of us, in any profession, in any department, that what we know to be true about our business data might not be the complete truth, or might no longer be true. So as you create new reports and analyses, always be on the alert for surprising results.
4. “Honestly, when we first saw these patterns, we were so stunned we wondered if we made some mistake,” Hungerman told the Journal’s reporter. “We weren’t even excited, we were like, ‘Is that right?’ ” This is exactly the correct response for Excel users. Surprising results often are incorrect results.
5. Notice that Hungerman refers to the importance of patterns in the data. Few management reports, unfortunately, are designed to help managers find patterns. Instead — in Excel reports and in Business Intelligence displays — managers tend to be overwhelmed by many single values, which makes patterns more difficult to discover. I invented spreadsheet dashboards in the early 1980s precisely so that I could find patterns in my data more easily, and I think you’ll find this approach useful today.
