[ale] [OT] How Do You Make a Good Charts?

[George Carless]

Marc Ferguson (marcferguson at gmail.com) wrote the following on Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 08:50:15AM -0500:
> Hi Fellas,
> 
> This is a really silly question, but I honestly don't know the answer. I'm
> using Google Docs to keep track of my health (blood pressure, food log,
> exercise, etc). I want to incorporate charts. For the life of me, I can't
> figure out how my data should be organized in order to create the charts.
> 
> The blood pressure chart worked, but when I tried to create one for
> exercise, it didn't. I don't know why and all my google searches end up with
> step by step instructions on how to make a chart via Excel. Not "How do I
> organize my data, in the first place, so that a chart can be created!"
> Thanks for any advice.
> 
> http://www.fergytech.com/images/google-docs-blood-pressure.png
> http://www.fergytech.com/images/google-docs-exercise.png

Marc, 

To echo a little of what others have been saying, I think your first step is to figure out what 
INFORMATION you're looking to derive from your charts; charts for their own sake aren't really very 
helpful. If you're looking for a breakdown of how your exercise regime breaks down in terms of 
time spent on different activities, for example, you might want to reshuffle your data a little to 
more easily provide total time spent (simple sum calculation) for each exercise type, and then chart 
these against one another in a pie chart. Or, you might be interested in adding a calorie calculation 
(approx) to each day's activities and then plotting how many calories you've burned on an ongoing 
basis, on a line chart.

I've just started working on getting in shape myself, as it happens (somehow I guess that might not be 
an uncommon goal on such a list as this ;); I've been using www.fitday.com, which is free and provides 
its own charts, and is good for logging exercise, food consumption, etc.  Having said that, it was 
basically the first such site that I googled, so if anyone has any better suggestions for existing 
websites I would love to hear them.  (Ideally, one with more of the [vegetarian] foods that I actually 
eat, so I don't need to manually enter quite as much!)  

At any rate, good luck with your fitness goals and with your charting!

George