From the course: Picking the Right Chart for Your Data

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Trends: Beyond the line

Trends: Beyond the line - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Picking the Right Chart for Your Data

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Trends: Beyond the line

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- [Narrator] One of my favorite ways to communicate a trend is called a slopegraph. A slopegraph is just a line chart but it's restricted to two data points. So rather than a curve or jugged line, you just see the starting and ending points. The emphasis then becomes the steepness and direction of the connecting line. This is a great chart to communicate overall change. Say you're tracking economic trends for a presidential campaign and have four years of data. You could do a line chart, and that will show nuance change over that time, but in a political environment you may simply want to point out the overall change for better or worse over the entire presidential term. In this case a slopegraph provides the narrower but clearer story about the overall change during the entire time period. Of course in politics everyone wants to manipulate their story to emphasize what they want to their opponents detriment. I am…

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