Often it is easy to get carried away with a tools features. Excel is no exception. But here is a list of grotesque charts that you should never make, not even on your last day at work.
1. Leave the radar charts for Spidermen
why?
- You can hardly conclude anything by looking at them
- They need lot of tweaking to make sense
- Visually revolting, even with perfect data points
2. Dont show, just eat your donuts
why?
- This is the evil twin of Pie
- Too many data points and it looks psychedelic
- Very difficult to compare between series
3. Don’t add dimensions to your lines
why?
- It is difficult to compare between series
- Can lead to wrong conclusions
- Often one series overlaps another to cause ambiguity
4. If one Pie is bad, two of them is worst
why?
- They provide very little information
- It is useless to use two pies, when you can tell the story with just one
5. Dont make your charts look like downtown
why?
- Lost information because of overlapping columns
- Difficult to see patterns
- Needs a lot of tweaking to make even the remotest sense
6. Save the unstacked area charts till we have x-ray vision
why?
- It is impossible to understand an unstacked chart in 2d, 3D makes it only worse
- They need lot of tweaking to make some sense
- Visually revolting, even with perfect data points
When in doubt, use a bar
More on charts: 73 beautiful excel chart templates – download free
2 Responses to “Celebrating the Lookup Formulas – VLOOKUP Week @ Chandoo.org”
How did you arrive or formula when you ask me who made more sales Jackie or Jamie?? I could not figure the formula out yet??
@Frank
You need to sum up the sales for Jackie and compare them to the sales of Jamie over the same period.
The practical parts depends on how and what data you have and how it is arranged.
But it will either involve a Sum, Sumif, Sumifs or Sumproduct to accummulate the sales for each within a specified date range.