As mentioned earlier we have moved to Seattle this Sunday. It seems like a great place already. Just that everything is more expensive than we are used to in Columbus. But I guess that is the premium we have to pay for being in a big city.
On to this week’s edition of excellent excel stuff posted online:
My friend Jon @ PTSBlog asks the critical question “what is the purpose of charting?” and answers it well with several examples. Of course we all think that the purpose of charts is normally to make information easier, not harder, to understand, but Jon enlightens us to other reasons why charts may be used.
What is the best way to color and label charts? Often when you have lots of data and need to depict it all in one chart and let the users find out the trends in it, we use color to make the job easier. Xlcubed blog suggests some ways to color and label the data to bring out critical trends.
When is Friday? If you work involves lots of payroll processing, then having a simple VBA UDF to find out when is the next Friday and when is the last Friday. Thankfully Daily dose of Excel has provided the functions for us.
Drawing in Excel – Manipulating shapes using VBA, Excel 2007 macro recorder no longer records your operations on shapes. That is where Newton Excel Bach‘s post on getting shape properties can be handy. Actually the post is a part of series of posts on Drawing in Excel. Read them if you work with shapes often.
Using Logarithmic Scale on your Chart Axis, excel chart axis options are pretty comprehensive. Jon points us to the logarithmic scale feature that can be very handy if you are depicting data that has exponential behavior and you want to remove that effect on the chart.
That is all. More excel links
8 Responses to “Introducing PHD Sparkline Maker – Dead Simple way to Create Excel Sparklines”
This looks like it could be very useful for a project I'm putting together right now, thank you so much. Quick & silly question, how do I copy & paste the sparkline as a picture?
Question answered. For anyone else:
Select chart>Hold Shift key & select Edit/Copy Picture>Paste
[...] more information about PHD Sparkline Maker, please read this article and to learn more about Sparklines, read this article from Microsoft Excel 2010 blog. Also there [...]
Am I right in thinking that the y-axis is set automatically by excel?
That makes it possible to get the column chart not to start at zero.
Andy - yes, it is currently set to 'auto', which defaults to a zero base for positive values, but you can change that by left-clicking the chart, then choosing (in Excel 2007):
"Chart Tools/Layout/Axes/Primary Vertical Axis/More Primary Vertical Axis Options"
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: When manually editing a chart's minimum/maximum axis values, PLEASE be sure there's a valid reason and that doing so won't skew the message shown by the data (e.g. by exaggerating differences). If in doubt, go back and read Tufte. (W.W.T.D.?)
[...] gridlines, axis, legend, titles, labels etc.) and resize it so that it fits nicely in a cell [example]. This is the easiest and cleanest way to get sparklines in earlier versions of excel. However this [...]
thanks for the work creating the template!!!!
looks good