In Petal Charts – an Alternative to Radar Charts I have suggested using a radar chart tweak to replace the radar charts. Both PTSBlog and Information Ocean have posted their critical reviews of these petal charts.
So as a penance for proposing petals, I am going to provide a tutorial on creating a comparison table in Excel for replacing the radar charts. We are going to create a comparison table chart like the one featured on right that is proposed at Information Ocean.
Creating Spot Matrix Charts in Excel in Just 5 Steps
The trick for creating comparison table like the above lies in using a dingbat (symbol) font named “Wingdings 2” that is pre-installed in most of the Windows machines.
- First arrange your data in tabular structure. For eg. let us assume this is the data we are trying compare:
- Now create another identical table. We are going to fill this one with one of the 5 circular symbols :
. 
Next go to an empty cell, lets say C3, and press ALT+I followed by S (Menu > Insert > Symbol). Set the font to “Wingdings 2” and insert these 5 circular symbols to the cell C3.- Now, in the blank table you have created in step 2, let us write formulas to fetch one of the circle symbols based on our data. A sample formula can be like this:
=MID($C$3,FLOOR((data-1)/5,1)+1,1)
Copy paste the formula in the entire table. - Finally, change the font of the new table to “wingdings 2”. Adjust colors / size if needed. When you are done, the comparison chart table should look like:
Download the Spot Matrix Charts Template and Replace your Radars
That is all. How do you like this compared to petals?
8 Responses to “Pivot Tables from large data-sets – 5 examples”
Do you have links to any sites that can provide free, large, test data sets. Both large in diversity and large in total number of rows.
Good question Ron. I suggest checking out kaggle.com, data.world or create your own with randbetween(). You can also get a complex business data-set from Microsoft Power BI website. It is contoso retail data.
Hi Chandoo,
I work with large data sets all the time (80-200MB files with 100Ks of rows and 20-40 columns) and I've taken a few steps to reduce the size (20-60MB) so they can better shared and work more quickly. These steps include: creating custom calculations in the pivot instead of having additional data columns, deleting the data tab and saving as an xlsb. I've even tried indexmatch instead of vlookup--although I'm not sure that saved much. Are there any other tricks to further reduce the file size? thanks, Steve
Hi Steve,
Good tips on how to reduce the file size and / or process time. Another thing I would definitely try is to use Data Model to load the data rather than keep it in the file. You would be,
1. connect to source data file thru Power Query
2. filter away any columns / rows that are not needed
3. load the data to model
4. make pivots from it
This would reduce the file size while providing all the answers you need.
Give it a try. See this video for some help - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u7bpysO3FQ
Normally when Excel processes data it utilizes all four cores on a processor. Is it true that Excel reduces to only using two cores When calculating tables? Same issue if there were two cores present, it would reduce to one in a table?
I ask because, I have personally noticed when i use tables the data is much slower than if I would have filtered it. I like tables for obvious reasons when working with datasets. Is this true.
John:
I don't know if it is true that Excel Table processing only uses 2 threads/cores, but it is entirely possible. The program has to be enabled to handle multiple parallel threads. Excel Lists/Tables were added long ago, at a time when 2 processes was a reasonable upper limit. And, it could be that there simply is no way to program table processing to use more than 2 threads at a time...
When I've got a large data set, I will set my Excel priority to High thru Task Manager to allow it to use more available processing. Never use RealTime priority or you're completely locked up until Excel finishes.
That is a good tip Jen...