Old news

A few days ago I talked about the gradient effect on the Excel in-cell bar charts. Coincidently today I came across a post I made to the Dashboard Spy blog back in the heady days of May 2006 when Office 2007 was in beta release. I posted a quick review of some of the conditional formatting available, including criticizing the gradient effect, but liking the ability to shrink the charts to make effective sparklines.

I was clearly too blown away by Office 2007 (or too confused by the ribbon?) to notice that even in my example shown, the bar chart scale does not start at zero, giving a false impression of the variability of the data. Anyway, maybe I was one of the first to vocalize my dislike of the gradient...

On a related note, a commenter on another website in Sept 2006 gives this possible reason for Microsoft's decisions on the in-cell bar charts:

The default graphs were hideous at best, but now, thanks to a focus-group-tested and user-centric decision probably made by marketing drones without a brain: Microsoft Excel deliberately misrepresents data, because it turns out, users didn't like empty cells in bar-graphs; idiots :-)

Undeniably harsh and unfair, but the commentator has some points that I will touch on soon about user-groups and designing interactions.