Bullet graphs provide an effective way to dashboard target vs. actual performance data, the bread and butter of corporate analytics.
Howmuchever effective they are, the sad truth is there is no one easy way to do them in excel. I have prepared a short tutorial that can make you a dashboard ninja without writing extensive formulas or installing unknown add-ins. So get out your shinobigatana and join me in a fresh excel sheet arena.
Before we create our first bullet graph, let us spend a few moments understanding these graphs. Stephen Few proposed bullet graphs as way to provide crisp view of “target vs. actual performance” numbers. Shown below is a sample bullet graph and how you would read it.
Read up more on this at PTS blog and on a Gauge chart that actually works.
Let us create your first bullet graph
Click here to download bullet-graph template excel sheet so that you can see while reading
Our technique of involves conditional formatting and simple formulas applied to a cell grid. Just follow these 4 easy steps:
Step 1: Prepare your data for charting
Since we are going to plot bullet graphs on a cell grid, we first need to normalize our data. I have chosen to plot each bullet graph on 20 cells in a row as shown in the raw grid shown to the right:
Assuming we have fictitious sales data like this:
You can normalize YTD sales figures using a simple formula like this : ROUND(YTD-sales/target*20,0)
Now that we have our data steaming hot, lets brew the graphs
Step 2: Lets make the raw grid formatted based on data
Now we will take the raw 20 cell grid in each row and conditionally format these cells so that we have background of the bullet graph drawn on them.
For eg. If the normalized sales data for Bad range is 7 and for OK Range is 15 then,
We will highlight first 7 cells lighter shade of gray, next 8 cells gray and last 5 cells with darker shade of gray.
I have shown the conditional formatting applied to these cells below:
When we are done, a sample row looks like this:
We have our cell grids ready now, lets shoot some bullets. 🙂
Step 3: Plot bullets on our graph canvas
Our final step involves print a bullet symbol (either – or + or | ) in each cell depending on one of the following conditions:
1. If the cell position (1,2,3 … 20) is equal to Year ago value and cell position is less than YTD value print a + symbol
2. If the cell position is equal to Year ago value and cell position is more than YTD value print a | symbol
3. If the cell position is less than YTD value print a –
4. Else print a blank
See the formula below:
Download the excel template for bullet graphs to understand this formula better
Step 4: Show off your bullet graphs, awe your boss or colleagues, bask in your Ninja glory
Unfortunately, I cannot tell you how to do this. I can only teach you to be a Ninja, but you have to be one to charm people with your tactics. 🙂
Shown below is another variation you can try. Also, you can experiment with the symbols printed (instead of + – | you can try other ASCII characters, for more download the excel sheet containing bullet graph templates)
Also try: Partition charts, Incell Graphs and much more.
8 Responses to “Top 5 keyboard shortcuts for Excel Charts”
As far as I remember (checked, again, 2 minutes ago) in my "Excel 2013" in order to select various chart elements I need to use the Arrow keys and not the TAB key.
Practically, the TAB key does nothing (within a Chart).
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Michael (Micky) Avidan
Thanks for pointing this out. This is how I remember it too, but when I was recording the video yesterday, only TAB key worked. MS must have changed the keys in Excel 2016. I have edited the post to include both keys.
The key navigation on charts is different in 2016.
TAB cycles through a layer of objects (SHIFT+TAB cycles backwards)
ENTER move down a layer
ESC moves up a layer
So on a column chart with title/legend/data labels if you select the plotarea the TAB will go through Title > Legend > Plotarea.
ENTER at plotarea will then select Vertical axis. Tab will take you through
Horizontal axis > gridlines > Series > Horizontal Axis.
ENTER with series selected will then allow you to TAB through individual data points and data labels.
If you ENTER on datalabels you can TAB through each data label.
ALT + F1 : to create default chart
ALT+E S T = CTRL + ALT + V, T : I find that easier to remember
I second what Michael already said about TAB and arrow keys. I can't help but think if this is related to the "," or ";" as separator. I prefer to use the chart tools - layout- drop down box, anyway.
Got to be F11 for instant charting. Highlight your data , hit F11 and voila! ?
Ctrl+1 is the most important chart shortcut. In fact, it works for any Excel object: whatever is selected, Ctrl+1 opens the task pane or dialog to format that object.
Somewhere along the line, maybe when Excel 2016 came out, the arrow keys stopped working to cycle through the elements of a chart. But what works is holding Ctrl while clicking the arrow keys. I haven't gotten used to the Tab and other keys, but as long as Ctrl+Arrow works, I'm good.
And F4 used to be so helpful when formatting a lot of charts. But since Excel 2007 came out, it has been mostly useless. It used to remember a whole set of changes at once, so I get that the newer modeless dialogs make that impractical. But now it only seems to work with formatting of lines and borders, and maybe fills. I find myself writing a lot of VBA one-liners in the Immediate Window to handle these tedious formatting tasks.
after clicking on a chart, is there a shortcut key to copy it?
Thank you for the Alt E S T - tip. This is more than a time saver. Because of dynamic charts or de-activated external references to data when you make the charts, you often have empty charts that are otherwise impossible to format. So this shortcut helps adressing that. I will work with it more and see if there remain some obstacles.