The Art of Excel Charting

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Yesterday while going through my feeds, I have landed on this post about the demographics and use-figures of various social networking (2.0) tools, et al (by businessweek) on think:lab blog. When I looked at the BusinessWeek’s graphical representation of demographics and usage figures of social networks, the first thought that came to me is, “well, this is something challenging to do in Excel“. So I started creating the chart in the most famous cell software :D, just to show you how the graph looked on BW site (click on it to see the bigger version),

the demographics and use-figures of various social networking (2.0) tools, et al(by businessweek)

(Download download the art of excel charting spreadsheet)

First up I tried creating a graphlet, a 10 by 10 cell grid that can be filled by ‘1’s based on a number between 1 and 100. The ‘1’s should be filled from left to right or right to left based on direction mentioned in a cell.

This task is simple, lets say the grid is from a1 to j10 and a11 has ‘the number of cells to be filled’ and a12 has the direction (either “R” or “L”)

The formula for any cell in the range of a1 to j10 would be,
= IF((ROW($a$10)-ROW())*10+11*(IF($a$12=”R”,0,1)) + (-1)^(IF($a$12=”R”,0,1))*((COLUMN($j$10)-COLUMN())+1)< =$a$11,1,"")

the above formula essentially means,
if direction is Left to Right,
if row of the cell * 10 + column of the cell is less than or equal to a11
return “1”
else return “”
else
if row of the cell * 10 + 10 – column of the cell is less than or equal to a11
return “1”
else return “”

Once I have the grid filled with required number of 1’s, I have applied conditional formatting (read: Creating cool dash-boards using excel conditional formatting) to change cell’s a ‘1’ in them to some color and blank ones to gray like this,

PHD Art of Excel Charting 2

The output was something like this,

PHD Art of Excel Charting 3

Now all I have to do is multiply this over the entire 7 columns and 6 rows like the BW’s graph and change the fill colors in conditional formatting. The final output looked something like this (click on it for a bigger version),

PHD art of excel charting 1

To end with, I have found out that doing this type of charts doesnt take much time although you need to have the creative juices to come-up with formats like this. What do you think?

For those of you who want to see how this is done and do a little bit of playing around, download the art of excel charting spreadsheet.

Also read:

PS: the images are from BusinessWeek.

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20 Responses to “Mortgage Calculator with Extra Payments – Excel Download”

  1. Rayd says:

    Kia ora Chandoo, thanks for this wonderful template brother. How can I modify this/ or do you have a similar template for a fortnightly
    payment? Thank you

    • Chandoo says:

      Morena Rayd. You can adjust the multiplier / divider to 26 (I think it was set to 12) to see fortnightly details. Watch the companion video to understand the steps / logic.

  2. Alicia says:

    It is very simple and easy to use. Is user interface is attractive. It is very helpful and beneficial for calculations.

  3. Vince says:

    This is great, thanks a lot!
    I think there is an error in the "You save X $ in interest". If i dont put any extra payment, it still says that I will save 19k in interest rate.

    • Chandoo says:

      I too realized this problem. I will post an update once I fix the error.

    • Chandoo says:

      Updated on 11-Sep: I fixed the problem with "interest saved" calculation. Turns out there was an internal bug in cumipmt function in Excel that reports incorrect values. Something new!
      Please use the link above to re-download the correct file.

  4. Lor says:

    Hi Chandoo, do you have a template that will make changes to figures going forward if the interest rate changes part way through the loan? Thank you for your help.

  5. Aniket says:

    I wanted calculator which can consider floating interest rate, can you please advise how to get that?

  6. Christine says:

    I love your tutorial. If I am making weekly acelerated mortgage payments, how to I account for that in the Eff term?

    Thank yo so much,

    Christine

    • VAGEESAN says:

      Hi Chandoo. I want an excel template where I can have my favourite stocks listed for which the prices changes on a dynamic basis every day as per the market. I mean a sheet which is linked to NSE for price changes and other changes like daily low, Daily high, Yesterday closing, last 10 day range, 52 week high, 52 week low, one month high, one month low, one week high and one week low etc

  7. Ritwik says:

    The excel is awesome but I am getting #NAME? error with the field 'Old Interest Paid' and subsequently Original Interest and Money saved. Can you tell me how to fix that. I am trying to check if I should complete my loan by the extra payments or instead invest the same amount elsewhere

    • Chandoo says:

      #NAME error could mean your Excel doesn't have one of the functions I am using. Can you tell me what version you are using? If I am not mistaken, this file requires Excel 365.

      • Monil says:

        Hi Chandoo, I am also getting the same error. I am using Office 2019. Would you be able to recommend a fix for this?

        Regards,

  8. Abhishek says:

    How do you change the dollar to rupees for whole sheet to match indian currency

  9. Hey Chandoo,
    Thank you for making the excel spreadsheet! It is great, but there another, little known money saving action that you can take to DRAMATICALLY reduce your total interest owed on your mortgage allowing you to pay it off 40% to 60% faster. I am going to share with you for free. It's called recasting your mortgage, which is a form of re-amortizing the interest that you owe on your loan by paying the the bank an early payment of $10,000 or more. The bank will modify your loan to cancel the original interest that you owe, and recalculate the total interest based on the new lower loan loan amount for the remaining term of the loan, instead of the original loan amount. This pays off the most expensive section of interest on your loan which is the next owed interest, instead of cancelling the interest at the end of your loan. Your charts show the interest being canceled on the last payments, however the interest can be canceled on your next upcoming portion of the loan, but keeps the ending date the same. However, the result of recasting the loan is you, pay the loan off 2 or 3 times faster, by paying off the portion of the loan with the highest interest cost. I am wondering if you can build a excel spreadsheet that shows this for me? I will pay you for making it. I am a mortgage loan officer and would like to use it to help my clients see the impact of paying off their loans this way. Thank you for considering this!

  10. Spiro Misi says:

    HI Chandoo.
    Excellent sheet i watched your video and tried to edit sheet to suit my current mortgage however i cant get it to work. I am trying to set it to weekly payments.
    I edited the monthly payments to =PMT(E7/52,E6*52,E5)
    eff.term =ROUND(NPER($E$7/52,$E$10,$D13),0)
    principal term to =PPMT($E$7/52,1,E13,D13)
    cb w/o to =IF(C13=1,$E$5,J12)+PPMT($E$7/52,C13,$E$6*52,$E$5)
    and interest paid to =IPMT($E$7/52,1,E13,D13) but i cant edit the arrays to increase the range to 1560 from 360, so i just added the numbers in and that worked for the array on the left but the old interest paid array im stuck. And the graph well the graph is useless now and i have no idea how to fix that. no idea at all.

    Any help would be great.

    Cheers

    • Chandoo says:

      To change the NUMBER OF ROWS, go to cell C13 and change the formula to
      =SEQUENCE(E6*52)

      The chart won't auto-adjust. So you need to adjust the chart's source data range to capture all rows.

  11. Karl says:

    Hey man, I really appreciate your contribution, this template is awesome, I am sure it will help me to plane my financial life, and also to pay debts earlier and create wealth.

    Thank you!!!

  12. clifton murphy says:

    how do i edit this to use months instead of years for term? i have a 90 month loan (7.5 years) that i am trying to use with this and it forces me to use 7 or 8 in years.

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