Juice Analytics, one of my favorite visualization blogs discussed about creating bubble charts that can depict search term competition among major travel sites in bubble bubble toil and trouble.
Chris, who wrote the article said,
The first tool we tried, simply on principle, was Excel 2003. As expected, making a … quality bubble chart in Excel 2003 is a hard problem. Here’s a draft of how far I got before giving in to label fatigue.
The bubbles themselves aren’t tough, but getting the labels right is hard. I’d love to see a solution, so if any reader wants to tackle it eternal fame can be yours.
Well, not that I would get eternal fame, but I wanted to give it a try, just for fun. Ever since I saw the NY Times Bubble chart on “how many times each political candidate used certain terms”, I have been itching to recreate it somewhere.
Here is the version I could create in Excel 2007
(larger version of the travel site search terms visualization)
How I made this?
- I started with travel patterns data Chris shared
- Then I used Excel formulas OFFSET() and ROW() and COLUMN() to rearrange the data in a tabular format (the original format is a matrix)
- Then I sorted the table on bubble size
- Now I made a bubble chart with 3 data series, one with bubble sizes >50%, one with 25-50% and the rest
- I formatted each series and added labels to the first two series
- Finally made some alignment and bingo
Download the excel file Travel Site Search Patterns – Excel Bubble Chart
(excel 2003 compatible, so you wont exactly see the above image, but one with slightly muffled colors)
How would you have designed the chart ?
Checkout other PHD Visualization Projects
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13 Responses to “Data Validation using an Unsorted column with Duplicate Entries as a Source List”
Pivot Table will involve manual intervention; hence I prefer to use the 'countif remove duplicate trick' along with 'text sorting formula trick; then using the offset with len to name the final range for validation.
if using the pivot table, set the sort to Ascending, so the list in the validation cell comes back alphabetically.
Hui: Brillant neat idea.
Vipul: I am intrigued by what you are saying. Please is it possible to show us how it can be done, because as u said Hui's method requires user intervention.
Thks to PHD and all
K
Table names dont work directly inside Data validation.
You will have to define a name and point it to the table name and then use the name inside validation
Eg MyClient : Refers to :=Table1[Client]
And then in the list validation say = MyClient
Kieranz,
Pls download the sample here http://cid-e98339d969073094.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/data-validation-unsorted-list-example.xls
Off course there are many other ways of doing the same and integrating the formulae in multiple columns into one.
Pls refer to column FGHI in that file. Cell G4 is where my validation is.
Vipul:
Many thks, will study it latter.
Rgds
K
[...] to chandoo for the idea of getting unique list using Pivot tables. What we do is that create a pivot table [...]
@Vipul:
Thanks, that was awesome! 🙂
@Playercharlie Happy to hear that 🙂
Great contribution, Hui. Solved a problem of many years!
Thanks to you, A LOT
Hi Hui,
Greeting
hope you are doing well.
I'm interested to send you a private vba excel file which i need to show detail of pivot in new workbook instead of showing in same workbook as new sheet.
Please contact me on muhammed.ye@gmail.com
Best Regards