Favorite Way to Display Data

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What's your favorite kind of chart/diagram/graph/plot?

Hard to say, I like schematic diagrams because they illustrate functional relationships between the parts. But I also like graphs because they illustrate mathematical relationships better.

P+ID's and FBD are the best way to display process diagrams

Depends on what information you're trying to display, and why.

In fact I am wresting with this very question because I am going through records of mileage on my car to look for patterns- seasons- and how much loosing my second job (due to the company going out of business) effects my car mileage.

Car mileage is not like your bank balance, or the stock market,- it doesn't go up AND down. Its just goes up. But the rate at which it goes up varies. And the amount that it varies is what I'm after. So plotting it like it's the stock market-simple time over quantity- doesn't work.

I dunno. I'm just thinking aloud.

Can you analyze the rate of increase over set time intervals?

Have mileage numbers written down in date books, and on invoices from repair shops. Theyre at random times. Either when I had the car serviced, or when the odometer hit a round a number I would write it on the date that it hit that number. One figure I did write down at the start of this year just because it was the start of this year.

So my data consists of random dates, then the car mileage next to the date. So I would have to calculate how many days elapsed between each date. Then divide the number of days into the amount of increase in miles between each date and the previous date. Then visualize it on a graph somehow.

The horizontal axis would be time. But the vertical couldnt be just total miles, because car mileage never goes down.

Or maybe I could do it that way just to start the project out.

I'd plot the miles/day versus time.
In the future, regular record keeping would result in better data.

Well...i cant go back in a time machine and live the last three years of my life over again. The Data I got is the data I got.

But yeah miles per day per interval is best I can do with the data available.