This post is a testament that readers of this blog are way cooler and enterprising than I am. Justin, who I must say, has some really amazing excel skills, contacted me in April with a VBA Script he made that can draw two circle Venn diagrams in excel. He wrote,
I regularly need to show the intersection between different populations (venn diagrams) and have struggled to find anything useful in XL2000 or XL2003
Most examples are static pictures of circles created in a graphics program to which users add labels – hardly ideal
While still a WIP – I’ve come up with a simple 2 circle venn tool.
It uses drawing objects [msoShapeOval] (nice to get the transparency)
I saw the script and was really impressed by the way it worked. I wrote back to him asking if it is ok to share this with the readers on PHD. And he said OK. Ever since I have been wanting to share this wonderful little tool with all of you.
Without further ado…
Venn Diagrams in Excel
1. First download the Venn diagrams in excel zip file from here [xls version here].
2. Now when you try to open the file, you must enable macros (in excel 2007, you may want to set the security to low and then reopen the file)
3. Click on the big button you see in the first sheet and specify the venn diagram details (how many in each circle, what is the intersection amount)
4. Click the “Draw Venn” button and you have a sparkling venn diagram ready
Once again, I really appreciate Justin for putting together such a nice tool and sharing it will all of us. Thank you 🙂
PS: If you like this, do say thank you to Justin in comments. I am sure he can take pretty much any amount of appreciation.
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