This week we are celebrating Your Week @ PHD. That means you get to read the excel tips shared by other readers of this blog.
Unhide all the sheets using simple macro by Kat
My single favourite simple macro ever – to fill in the gap that Excel leaves. Unhiding -all- hidden tabs in a workbook at once. I install it in the personal.xls workbook, and save myself hours of clicking.
Sub Unhide_All_Sheets() Dim wsSheet As Worksheet For Each wsSheet In ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets wsSheet.Visible = xlSheetVisible Next wsSheet End Sub
A KPI Dashboard using VBA and Charts by David
After learning a whole lot over the past few months from this site and others (so many I can’t even remember right now – but I will make a list soon of where I found things), I constructed a KPI spreadsheet (see link below). This spreadsheet allows our institution to create standardized KPI reports for university consumption.
I attempted to keep the colors muted even though I chose school colors (from the publishing guide) for the actual graph.
Features
The chart is dynamically configured in numerous ways. The user can control the title (via cell entry on left), color of bars (via color of data labels), number format (via number format of the first data cell), and the display and printing of the trend line. The KPI name comes from the sheet, and the vertical axis is determined based on the data (I find the maximum value and divide by 4).
To-dos
I would like the user to be able to enter new descriptive items via a form with the option to include variables (KPI_Name, KPI_Category, etc.). I would like the user to be able to include more than one chart on a page (some KPIs actually need to track parts of the whole).
I am sure there are more features I will think of as time goes on but I wanted to let others see this and hopefully be able to incorporate it into their/your own work. The file is available here: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/749941/KPIs_PHD.xlsm. Hopefully I will be starting a blog soon to talk more about what we are doing here with excel and other products.
Using Find Dialog to Solve a Tricky Problem by Christy Lee
Introduction:
On a project I recently worked, we crunched several hundred (about 400) rows of data. The creator of the original document did not have any way to foresee the life this project would take on! So…there was only one field for ‘Name’ which contained the names of the team members for the corresponding step of the overall project.
Challenge:
As the project progressed, an individual may be added to multiple task teams. So, your name might be one of three in four records, one of ten in fifteen records, etc. Also, the team members could be added on the fly…you see how the complications arise quickly! Oh, and the project was run on three continents in four countries….
Each person was responsible for updating their pertinent information. Because of the complexity of that one name cell, filtering and sorting became cumbersome.
Solution:
Hide all rows except for the header row.
Do a search on your name (fortunately, in about three dozen team members, we had no duplicate last names!)
When the search results dialog comes up, select all of the records (select first, shift+select last)
Go to Format>Row>Show.
Whoo Hoo! There are all (and ONLY) the records that belong to you.
Array Formulas to the Rescue by Rajinikanth
This is the formula to find out Employees first login time and last logout time for the day.
Example : Suppose employee table is starting form Column B
then the table looks like :
Name Code
1001 rajinikanth
1002 srinivas
1003 vardhan
and the Login Data is starting from Column G in a sheet
Then The formula for First login :
{=1/MAX((B8=$G$7:$G$15)*($H$7:$H$15<>0)*(1/$H$7:$H$15))}
and the formula for Last Logout :
{=MAX(($G$7:$G$15=B7)*($I$7:$I$15))}
A Big Warm Lovely Heartfelt Thank you to Kat, David, Christy and Rajinikanth. You are truly wonderful.
Be a part of the “your week” @ PHD
Come, be part of the your week celebrations at PHD. Click here to submit your excel tips. Your tips will be shared with all our readers during this week (May 11-15, 2009)
PS: If you have already shared your tips and not seeing them in this post, don’t worry. I am posting only a few everyday, so yours will be in the next 3 posts.
14 Responses to “Group Smaller Slices in Pie Charts to Improve Readability”
I think the virtue of pie charts is precisely that they are difficult to decode. In many contexts, you have to release information but you don't want the relationship between values to jump at your reader. That's when pie charts are most useful.
[...] link Leave a Reply [...]
Chandoo,
millions of ants cannot be mistaken.....There should be a reason why everybody continues using Pie charts, despite what gurus like you or Jon and others say.
one reason could be because we are just used to, so that's what we need to change, the "comfort zone"...
i absolutely agree, since I've been "converted", I just find out that bar charts are clearer, and nicer to the view...
Regards,
Martin
[...] says we can Group Smaller Slices in Pie Charts to Improve Readability. Such a pie has too many labels to fit into a tight space, so you need ro move the labels around [...]
Chandoo -
You ask "Can I use an alternative to pie chart?"
I answer in You Say “Pie”, I Say “Bar”.
This visualization was created because it was easy to print before computers. In this day and age, it should not exist.
I think the 100% Bar Chart is just as useless/unreadable as Pies - we should rename them something like Mama's Strudel Charts - how big a slice would you like, Dear?
My money's with Jon on this topic.
The primary function of any pie chart with more than 2 or 3 data points is to obfuscate. But maybe that is the main purpose, as @Jerome suggests...
@Jerome.. Good point. Also sometimes, there is just no relationship at all.
@Martin... Organized religion is finding it tough to get converts even after 2000+ years of struggle. Jon, Stephen, countless others (and me) are a small army, it would take atleast 5000 more years before pie charts vanish... patience and good to have you here 🙂
@Jon .. very well done sir, very well done.
good points every one...
I've got to throw my vote into Jon's camp (which is also Stephen Few's camp) -- bars just tend to work better. One observation about when we say "what people are used to." There are two distinct groups here (depending on the situation, a person can fall in either one): the person who *creates* the chart and the person who *consumes* the chart. Granted, the consumers are "used to" pie charts. But, it's not like a bar chart is something they would struggle to understand or that would require explanation (like sparklines and bullet graphs). Chart consumers are "used to" consuming whatever is put in front of them. Chart creators, on the other hand, may be "used to" creating pie charts, but that isn't an excuse for them to continue to do so -- many people are used to driving without a seatbelt, leaving lights on in their house needlessly, and forwarding not-all-that-funny anecdotes via email. That doesn't mean the practice shouldn't be discouraged!
[...] example that Chandoo used recently is counting uses of words. Clearly, there are other meanings of “bar” (take bar mitzvah or bar none, for [...]
[…] Grouping smaller slices in pie chart […]
Good article. Is it possible to do that with line charts?
Hi,
Is this available in excel 2013?