Update 5/2/2009: Chart Tamer is released. You can download the final version here.

We released today a beta version of our latest BonaVista product Chart Tamer. We released Chart Tamer as a private beta to a group of Excel Experts: Jon Peltier, Charley Kyd, Jorge Camoes, Kelly O’Day, the folks at Juice Analytics, Rolf Hichert and Chandoo. Based on the feedback we get from this group of selected experts make the product public available end March.

I would like to share with you some first impressions about what Chart Tamer does and how it looks like. The following is an an excerpt of the Chart Tamer introduction document written by Stephen Few, which you can download below.

What Chart Tamer Does

Chart Tamer improves the charts that we produce with Excel in the following ways:

• It limits the list of available charts to the few that are most useful, thereby reducing the complexity of choosing an appropriate chart
• It provides a simple new interface for selecting an appropriate chart, which guides us to the right selection when help is needed without bogging us down when it’s not
• It adds three useful charts that aren’t currently available in Excel: dot plots, strip plots, and box plots
• It revises the formatting defaults of Excel’s charts so that no extra work is necessary to create charts that work effectively
• It provides colors for use in charts and elsewhere that were designed to work especially for data presentation
• It allows us to quickly and easily improve old charts that were created prior to Chart Tamer

When you use Chart Tamer to create a new chart, the following dialog box makes it easy to choose the most appropriate chart:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rarely will we ever need a chart other than the 14 that appear in the Select a chart section above. If we already know which of these charts will display the data best, we can click it immediately, without having to wade through any other choices. If we want some guidance, however, we can narrow the list of available charts by making selections in the Select a relationship and Select what you want to feature sections.

Let’s assume we want to create a chart for annual product sales data:

 

 

We select the time series relation ship type what narrows the list of available charts to the six charts below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The list of available charts can be narrowed further by selecting an item in the "Select what you want to feature” section.  In our scenario we want to show how sales has changed through time and also want to feature the overall trend, so we choose Overall trends and patterns.  This further narrows the list of available charts to the two versions of the line chart charts below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clicking the line chart icon creates you a reasonable formatted line chart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Chart Tamer default dialog box allows you to adjust the defaults of the chart data objects:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s the Color dialog box that we use whenever colors need to be assigned to something in Excel:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The colors that Chart Tamer provides were carefully selected by Maureen Stone of StoneSoup Consulting, an expert in the use of color for data presentation. Chart Tamer makes it easy to avoid bad uses of color in the following ways:

• It provides color palettes that were carefully selected for their ability to present data effectively, which means that you would have to go out of your way to select poor colors
• It sets default colors for all the components of charts (line colors, bar colors, etc.)
• It simplifies and streamlines the color selection process through its Color dialog box
• It teaches us effective color design practices through example

Download the full story behind Chart Tamer written by its Chief Designer Stephen Few:

(Update 11 Feb 2009: Temporarily removed the documents for a revision)