One of my colleagues had a presentation to give this week regarding his program. He wanted a nice graphic / chart, to show his team which parts of the program were costing the most money. He created various charts himself, and then asked me to make one particular chart more interesting.  The original can be seen below (please note I’ve changed the labels and actual data to protect my colleague and his program):

It’s obvious in the case above that the “Jeans” series is costing the most money

My first suggestion was to reorder the categories, so that the most costly were at the bottom (In the same manner as a Pareto chart). Immediately, the information is visually easier to understand

However, the chart still doesn’t look so “sexy”. So my second suggestion was to create an overlay, so that the final chart looked like a multi-coloured dollar sign. You…