Next time you want to make a chart to tell how your sales (defects, customer calls, page views, number of clicks, walk-ins etc.) are doing over a period of time, consider showing them in a min-max chart.
For eg. a min-max sales chart for the last 12 months tells average, minimum and maximum sales per each month. See below for an example:
Min Max Excel Chart - An Example of Monthly Sales Data
These are really easy to create and can tell more than simple sales are up story. The best part is you can make the min-max charts with ease.
1. Have your data ready
The first step of course is to have the data ready. It is not always you have the minimum, maximum sales details for a give month, so you may want to summarize the data before moving to the next step. For our example, let us revisit ACME products (trivia acme link for curious mice out there). The data looks like this:
2. Create an Area Chart
As you might have already guessed, these min-max charts are nothing but area charts in disguise.
So, select the tabular data and click on “insert > chart” and select area chart (just the simple area chart, not the stacked area chart)
3. Format the Chart to Get the Min-Max Effect
This is the last step. First you may want to adjust the data series order of the area chart to ensure that the areas are overlapped properly. See below:
To adjust the order, right click on any of the areas and select “format data series” option, then go to “series order” tab.
The only formatting necessary is filling the bottom most area with white color (the minimum part). But you can also remove the plot area background – the gray color and adjust the fonts. Also, you can adjust the colors of other 2 areas (average and maximum) and adjust the border line width of average to make it standout.
That is all, there are no further steps, so go ahead, create your own min-max chart and let the conversation begin.
Like this? Also try: Thermometer charts in Excel, Micro bar charts, Gantt charts with excel bar graphs
23 Responses to “Learn Top 10 Excel Features”
What it looks like if excel without formula?? 🙂
It would be not excel it would just be fancy tables in which you could just use power point. (Chandoo) would Access be an alternative?
Awesome piece of work!!!
Great article.
Chandoo - my biggest interest in the article was the awesome word-graphic at the top - where did you go to get it done into a shape?
@Rich.. thank you. I used http://www.tagxedo.com/ to generate this word cloud. I took all the comments in the original post, pasted them in tagxedo website and set up the shape etc.
Awesome Chandoo.. You need always needs coffee to start up with. BTW , how did u created the Heart Shaped picture filled with High Repetitive text in it .. Please put it on your Next blog ...
Chandoo, good article. I’ve added a link to it from Connexion – our collection of the most useful and interesting spreadsheet-related articles from the web. See http://www.i-nth.com/resources/connexion
Hi,
Just one small question. Where the hell have been I in the past for not discovering this website sooner?
I've lost a job interview recently where even though I had the subject knowledge, I was not upto their mark in Excel.
Thank you for all the free tips, guidance and for creating this forum environment.
[PS: I've just been through the site for the 1st time, and have signed up for the newsletter. You can expect pretty stupid questions from me soon]
Hy Chandoo, you always inspire me with to explore something new in excel. This data structure table is only for excel 2007 or compatible to 2010. I recently installed latest excel version 2013 in my System and experience problems regarding operating according to previous one. I'm waiting your article relates to that excel version.
Thanks
Awesome article Mr. Chandoo and that is a awesome heart shaped pic you created. Great tips as well.
[...] Learn Top 10 Excel Features | Chandoo.org – Learn Microsoft Excel Online. [...]
Chandoo is awesome..
Thanks, i got better, And i always get 90.50 in my grade card but now i get 96.50 i improved because of the tutorials you gave, Thank You Very Much Chandoo Guy.
Hi chandoo, i am intersted in seeing the video or step by step done procedure of analysing the comments and presenting in the data percentage steps. I think this one would be first step in finding out how generally happens data calculation. Thank you.
As well i would like to know how to get that black shape art of your face which i see in chandoo. I am interested in making it for me.
Nice to see the features considered by Excel users to be most useful. It might be a good idea to also analyze StackOverflow Excel questions to see what keywords appear most often.
Here are my top 10 Excel Features (for advanced users):
http://www.analystcave.com/excel-10-top-excel-features/
Thanks a ton for this it totally helped with my homework ????
Very good effort
Thank you for this. Lots of learning in the links you've provided for this septuagenarian.
Pls send me new post
Dude, your humor ? ?
Loved your work.
Hello Sir,
I am Sanjeev Khakre and i from Indore City, India , I am your big follower and i have watch your videos and learnt a lots of excel trick or function and many more . thanks so much for all of your excellent support.
Your excel knowledge is real awesome.
Thanks
Sanjeev
Your work is excellent but pls willing to know more details about the features of microsoft excel
Chandoo Would Access be a better alternative than VB?