Dynamically Grouping Related Events [Excel Combo Charts with Pizzazz]

Yesterday we have posted how to use excel combo charts to group related time events. In the comments, Art Johnson says,

This is awesome. I love this blog. I have dealt with this issue before. Usually my issue is monthly anomolies caused by fiscal months of 4 weeks followed by 4 weeks, and then 5 weeks in each quarter. This causes a spike in March, June, Sept., and Dec. It’s one reason I prefer to look at quarterly trends rather than monthly. This chart is quite nice to see these effects. Is there a way to just toggle between two charts? One of weekends and one of weekdays? […]

This effect can be easily achieved with a cup of coffee, one combo box form control and the good old IF formula. Look at it yourself.

I am not going to provide the complete recipe. But here is the gist. I am sure you can take the help of that coffee in case you are stuck.

1. Add a combo-box form control using forms tool bar or Developer ribbon. (not able to find the developer toolbar in excel 2007? see this)
2. Set the input range for combo box to two cells where the values “weekdays” and “weekends” are mentioned.
3. Also set the “cell link” for the combo box to some free cell like IV32000
4. Now change the dummy series (the range where the column chart values for zebra lines are mentioned) values to a formula.
5. The formula should be able to change the dummy values based on the selection in combo box. This is your homework to figure out.
6. That is all. You now have a chart that dynamically groups events based on user selection. Pretty cool eh ?

Download the workbook and see it yourself

Click here to download the workbook and play with it.

Where can you use this technique?

Oh, several places. To begin with,

• To highlight new products vs. older products in a product-wise sales chart
• To highlight top 10 vs. bottom 10 values in a big chart
• To highlight values of a certain product / project vis-a-vis the whole set of values

What do you think about this idea?

Have you ever tried similar ideas in a report or dashboard? What is your experience? Personally I find dynamic charts more effective compared to static charts. Users like them, they like to play with the control(s) and make their own observations. Do you agree?

PS: If you are looking for a way to compare 2 KPIs or metrics in charts, see the part 5 of dashboard tutorial