As mentioned earlier, I have conducted a small interview with Charley Kyd – an Excel MVP, author of four books and 50+ articles for various national media, owner of exceluser.com and creator of popular products like plug-n-play excel dashboard kit. He sent me the answers almost a week back, but I could push the interview only today due to my travel and settling down stuff. As expected the interview is very entertaining and useful. I hope you like this.
Q: What are your 3 favorite formulas?
I don’t have favorite formulas, but here are three functions I use all the time:
- INDEX
- MATCH (with the third argument equal to zero)
- SUMPRODUCT
Q: If I am an excel newbie, what three books or resources you would recommend?
MrExcel.com forum for asking questions
Check out Microsoft discussion groups and microsoft.public.excel newsgroup for asking questions
Q: How can managers and analysts be more productive in using excel?
- Don’t upgrade to Excel 2007, or, if you do, keep a copy of Excel 2003 on your computer. (When you install 2007 on top of 2003, answer No when the install program asks if you want to upgrade to the new version.)
- Wherever possible, separate your data from your presentation, then use formulas to pull your data into your presentation. (My three “favorite” functions help you to do that.)
- Learn shortcut keys. In versions prior to Excel 2007, the Alt key commands are consistent. And 2007, allows you to use the earlier versions’ Alt-key combinations for many things.
Q: What resources (books, websites) would you recommend for this type of people?
I’ll be talking more about separating data and presentation at ExcelUser.com over the coming year. Subscribe to my newsletter to be alerted about developments.
Q: Do you think a small business owner run her shop using excel and few free tools ? What you suggest her?
Yes and no. I would not recommend that you use Excel for accounting. Quicken is really inexpensive and does a much better job. But Excel can help in many other ways, including analysis, forecasting, pricing, and so on.
Q: Where do you think most of us waste a lot of time while using excel ?
- Importing data from other systems / sources?
We perform the same reporting or analytical task over and over again, but with different data. When you notice yourself doing this, try to come up with ways that you can use formulas in one workbook to pull the data you need from a data workbook. That way, you can merely point your analysis or presentation to an updated data workbook without having to do everything over again from scratch.
- Formulas and errors ?
Many people don’t know how to switch to manual calculation. (Tools, Options, Calculation, Manual.) This allows us to work on a big spreadsheet without waiting for it to calculate all the time. Then, when we want to calculate, we merely press the F9 key.Many people create much larger workbooks and spreadsheets than they should, and then get lost in them. I try to keep my workbooks and spreadsheets small, unless I have a specific reason not to do so.
Many people create many links between workbooks. This is a problem because the links can break, or get broken, or generate circular calculation errors. I try to link only from data to presentation.
Assume we have a column of data in the range A5:A10. If we want to sum that data, people generally enter the formula =SUM(A5:A10). Instead, I format cells A4 and A11 with a full border and gray fill. Then I sum using the range A4:A11. This allows me to add or delete rows between the gray borders without having to worry about formulas that reference that data. As long as I don’t touch the two gray border rows, I know I’m safe. (I don’t use this approach if I’m going to print the page for others, because it looks ugly. But that’s not a problem most of the time.)
- Formatting ?
I try never to use Merge Cells for centering labels across several columns. (In fact, I doubt that I’ve used Merge Cells more than half a dozen times, *ever*.) Instead, I use Format, Cells, Alignment, Horizontal, Center Across Selection. This achieves the same results but without my having to deal with the problems that merged cells creates.
- VBA ? VBA is very powerful, and can be a lot of fun. But be careful, it can grow to be an addiction. Most VBA users have found themselves spending hours to write a program that saves them several minutes. That’s obviously not a good use of our time.I try very hard to comment my code heavily. And when I look at old code, I *always* wish that I had commented it even more heavily. When you’re in the middle of a project, the reason for each line of code is obvious. But six months later, the whole thing is a mystery. COMMENT YOUR CODE.
Q: What is the best way for a non-programmer to learn and use VBA in her day to day work?
- Stay with a version of Excel prior to 2007, for two reasons: There aren’t any good macro books about 2007, and the macro recorder doesn’t work for a lot of what you do in 2007.
- Get a beginners book and start to experiment.
- Use the macro recorder and look at the results.
- Ask questions in newsgroups and forums.
- Get to know the Object Browser. (In the VBE, choose View, Object Browser. Or merely press the F2 key.)
I am very thankful to Charley for agreeing for this interview and sharing his views on some of the day to day excel issues all of us face. Many thanks to commenters who suggested some of the questions. I hope you found this interview helpful. Let me know through comments or email what you think about this.
Also share your ideas on who else should be interviewed?
31 Responses to “Beautiful Budget vs. Actual chart to make your boss love you”
Would be considerably easier just to have a table with the variance shown.
On Step 3, how do you "Add budget and actual values to the chart again"?
There are a few ways to do it.
Easy:
1) Copy just the numbers from both columns (Select, CTRL+C)
2) Select the chart and hit CTRL+V to paste. This adds them to chart.
Traditional:
1) Right click on chart and go to "select data..."
2) From the dialog, click on "Add" button and add one series at a time.
One more way to accomplish it is just select the columns into chart. Press Ctrl+C and then press Ctrl+V
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work for me in Excel 2010. The "Var 1" and "Var 2" columns cannot combine two fonts to display the symbol and the figure side-by-side.
Secondly, there is no option to Click on “Value from cells” option when formatting the label options. The only options provided are Series Name, Category Name or Value.
@TheQ47... the emoji font also has normal English letters, so if you use that font, then you should be ok. I am assuming your computer doesn't have that font or hasn't been upgraded for emoji support.
Reg. Excel 2010, you can manually link each label to a cell value. Just select one label at a time (click on labels, wait a second, click on an individual label) and press = and link it to the label var 1 or var 2.
I am using excel 2010, please explain how to apply Step 12
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Hi Neeraj,
"Value from cells" option is only available in Excel 2013 or above. In older versions, you have to manually adjust the label value by linking each label seperately.
Read this please: https://chandoo.org/wp/change-data-labels-in-charts/
Sir, you are just awesome.
Your creativity has no limit.
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Hi Chandoo,
I just found your website, and really love it. It helps me a lot to be an Excel expert 😉
Currently I am facing with a problem at step 11:
Var1 Var2
D30%
A5%
B0%
B4%
B7%
C10%
C13%
D27%
I42%
Though at mapping table, I used windings, here formula uses calibra. How I can change it? I am able to change only the whole cell. In this case numbers will be Windings too.
Thanks for your help!
Hi Mariann... Welcome to Chandoo.org and thanks for your comment.
If you wanted to use symbols from wingdings and combine them with % numbers, then you need to setup two labels. One with symbol, in wingdings font and another with value in normal font. Just add the same series again to the chart, make it invisible, add labels. You may need to adjust the alignment / position of label so everything is visible.
[…] firs article explains how you can enhance your charts with symbols. You can simply insert any supported symbol into your data and charts. To some extend you can […]
You're a good person, thank you to share your knowledge with us, I will try to do in my work
Great visualization of variance. My question is that is this possible in powerbi?
How would you go about it?
HELLO, WHY CANT I FIND VALUES FOR LABELS IN EXCEL 2013
Dear chanddo sir,
What to do if we have dynamic range for Chart. How this will work. can you able to make the same thing works on dynamic range.
Sir Chandoo,
Good Day!
First, I'd like to say that I am very grateful for your work and for sharing all these things with us.
I tried to do this chart but it seems that the symbols don't work with text (abs(var%),"0%") unless we keep the Windings font style.
The problem is, it converts the text into symbol as well and you wont see the 0% anymore. I'm using Windows 7.
WOW - Segoe UI Emoji
This is the greatest discovery for me this month 🙂 Thanks for sharing.
Here's my two-cents:
https://wmfexcel.com/2019/02/17/a-compelling-chart-in-three-minutes/
Sir This is awesome chart, and very easy to made because of your way to explain is very simple , everyone can do. Thank you
one problem i am facing, I hv made this chart , but when i am inserting data table to chart it is showing two times , how can i resolve this
in this chart when i am adding new month data for example first i made this chart jan to mar but when i add data for the apr month graphs updated automatically but labels are missing for that new month
Hi Renuka,
Please make sure the formulas for labels are also calculated for extra months. Just drag down the series and set label range to appropriate address.
So I am playing with the Actual chart here - but amounts are bigger than your - you have 600 as Budget - my budget is 104,000 - is there a way to shorten that I am unaware of
thank you - I LOVE YOUR SITE
Thanks for the tips and tricks on Excel. In the Planned versus Actual chart examples, you use multiple values (ex. multiple Categories in above). How can this be done when we have only 1 set of values? For example if I have only this:
Planned Actual
SOW Budget 417480 367551
How can I create a single bar chart like the one above?
Thank you Chandoo.
This one is just perfect for my Quarterly Review presentation on Operational Budget against Actual Performance for the Hospital I'm currently working with.
Just Subscribed today (10 minutes ago)
Is there a way to make the table of data into a pivot table to be able to add a slicer for the graph due to many different categories and months?
Hi, I tried to modify you template with something appropriate for me, and I found a problem. this template was modified by me started with excel 2010, then 2016 and finally 2019. Same thing - somehow appear an error - or didn't show the emoticons for positive percentage or doubled the emoticons for some rows. I suspect to be from excel. if is need it I can sand you my xlsx for study. Please help if you can.
Hi Chandoo,
Could you please check the Var Formula in Step1. You have mentioned budget-actual and when i did this i got different values but when reversed like actual-budget i got the actual value what you have demonstrated in step1.
Please share your view.
This is a great chart (budget vs. actual). However, in trying recreate it, I cannot color in the UP Down bars individually, and they all become formatted with the same color. I'm using Office 365. Look forward to the feedback.
Thanks.
Dan
pls explain in detail step 7
While in the Excel sheet you have used following formula for Var
Var = Actual - Budget
But
in the note, you have written
Var = Budget - Actual
Good Presentation and Data information.thank you so much chandoo.