Recipe for a Donut Bar Chart

Share

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

We all know that bar charts can be used to display values spread across various categories or times. We also know that pie charts / donut charts can be used to display percentage breakup of various quantities in a sum total. How about mashing up both to create a Donut Bar chart?

“oh, donut what?!? It sounds like a brand new junk food from dunkin’ donuts”

Well, not really. It is a mash-up or combo chart using which you can display, for eg. sales over last few years along with percentage break-up of individual products. See below to understand.

Use Donut Bar Charts to Display Product-wise Breakups in Sales

In the above chart we have mixed a bar chart with a donut chart and sprinkled it generously with a scroll bar form control.

In this charting tutorial, we will learn how to cook a donut bar chart using Microsoft Excel. Scroll down the page to get the downloadable workbook to see this in action.

Recipe for making a donut bar chart

A good donut bar can be healthy while adding variety to your regular menu of charts. To make a neat looking donut bar chart, just follow the recipe.

Ingredients:

Sales data (finely chopped – year vs product level), one donut chart, one bar chart, one scroll bar form control and 5 minutes of spare time.

Step 1: Get your dough, err, data ready

As with any chart, we need the right data in right format to make a perfect donut bar chart.

I have arranged the data for our chart in the below format.

Data and Format for Donut Bar Chart

The last column shows the values as per scroll bar position. (more on this in the next steps)

Step 2: Insert a scroll bar control and link it to a cell

Scrollbar settings for Donut Bar ChartGo to developer ribbon tab and insert a scroll bar form control. (learn more about turning on developer toolbar in excel 2007)

Once you have the scroll bar, link it to a cell, say B18.

Also, set the scroll-bar minimum value as 1, maximum value as the number of years you have (in our case it is 14) and incremental change to 1.

Step 3: Determine product-wise breakups and totals based on scroll bar selection

We can use INDEX() excel formula to do this.

What is INDEX excel formula?

INDEX formula (examples) returns a specific value from a range of cells by taking the row and column of that range as input. For eg. =INDEX(A1:C10,2,1) will return the value in 2nd row, 1st column, ie, the value in cell A2.

So, how to write the INDEX formula in our case?

That is your home work. Just use the kitchen sink to experiment.

Once you are done, the product-wise breakups should be listed in a tabular format like this.

Scrollbar settings for Donut Bar Chart

Step 4: Put everything together and boil for a minute

We have done all the ground work required to make the donut bar chart. Now, We just need to put everything together and make some charts. Here we have 4 small steps.

steps for making donut bar chart

  1. Insert a donut chart using the product-wise breakup data
  2. Insert a bar chart with the yearly totals
  3. Insert another series in the bar chart to show the selected year total. Completely overlap this series with the totals series.
  4. Position everything together.

Finally adjust formatting and colors as per your taste.

That is all, the donut bar is ready for consumption. Serve hot or chilled. The donut bar tastes great with a cup of coffee.

Download the donut bar chart excel work book and play with it

Click here to download the donut bar chart template & workbook. Change the values and chart attributes to understand how this works.

Also try a Bar Pie chart, just follow the same recipe, but replace donut with pie.

Please tell me how your donut bar tasted using comments. 🙂

Recommended charting tutorials for you:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Share this tip with your colleagues

Excel and Power BI tips - Chandoo.org Newsletter

Get FREE Excel + Power BI Tips

Simple, fun and useful emails, once per week.

Learn & be awesome.

Welcome to Chandoo.org

Thank you so much for visiting. My aim is to make you awesome in Excel & Power BI. I do this by sharing videos, tips, examples and downloads on this website. There are more than 1,000 pages with all things Excel, Power BI, Dashboards & VBA here. Go ahead and spend few minutes to be AWESOME.

Read my storyFREE Excel tips book

Overall I learned a lot and I thought you did a great job of explaining how to do things. This will definitely elevate my reporting in the future.
Rebekah S
Reporting Analyst
Excel formula list - 100+ examples and howto guide for you

From simple to complex, there is a formula for every occasion. Check out the list now.

Calendars, invoices, trackers and much more. All free, fun and fantastic.

Advanced Pivot Table tricks

Power Query, Data model, DAX, Filters, Slicers, Conditional formats and beautiful charts. It's all here.

Still on fence about Power BI? In this getting started guide, learn what is Power BI, how to get it and how to create your first report from scratch.

37 Responses to “Quickly Change Formulas Using Find / Replace”

  1. Andras Ujszaszy says:

    Chandoo,
    this is a really cool stuff what I use quite often. In addtion this method also could be a good choice to switch the reference type of the formulas from relative to absolute or vice versa. (just simply replace the $ in the same way).
    Andras

    • Chandoo says:

      @Andras: you are right, we can use find / replace to change references, reference types etc. Now, only if they had regex in find/ replace, we could so much more 🙂

      @Tony Rose: Thank you. This is very useful and powerful feature. I even use it for cleaning up data. While formulas are good, they are not the solution for every problem. Often when I need more powerful cleanup / changing, I copy paste the stuff to text editors like notepad++ and then use their find/replace to do the dirty task.

      • Sonia says:

        What if i have to change the formula from ='Analysis'!C1 to 'Analysis 1'!C1?
        I tried doing it using Find /Replace but could't. Encountered some errors.

        And is there a way to change this using VBA???

        • Ollie says:

          Hi,

          Did you ever get a reply to this?

          Thanks

          Ollie

        • MF says:

          to make your life easier, suggest you to avoid (Space) in worksheet names whenever possible. Consider (underscore) instead.

          • Luke Moraga says:

            As the first formula wouldn't have the single apostrophes (since there's no space) need to include that in replace. So, search for:
            Analysis

            and replace with:
            'Analysis 1'

  2. Tony Rose says:

    This could be the most useful tips I've seen in a while. I use this all the time and can instantly change 400 formulas with a few clicks. Like so many other functions in Excel, I don't know what I would do without this one.

    Keep 'em coming!

  3. [...] on formulas: 5 areas where mouse kicks keyboard’s butt | Edit formulas in bulk using Find / Replace | Excel Formulas Online [...]

  4. purushoth says:

    THANKS BRO

  5. The Red Ranger says:

    You, sir, are a god among men...

  6. David says:

    This is really cool. Your just save me hours of work. Thanks.

  7. Jodie says:

    Thanks so much for this fix! It saved me tons of work. I'm muddling my way through and this really helped!

  8. Jesse says:

    Oh... My... God!
    This tip just saved me about 2 hours every month! I can't believe how easy it is to use. Now, can somebody tell me who I should call to get a refund for the previous 100 hours I spent manually changing formulas cell by cell?
    Thanks so much! 

  9. Bilal says:

    THANK YOU!!!!
    You saved me hours, I had a sheet that has more than 500 formulas, and i needed to replace the year in all of them, you saved me hours

  10. Elliot says:

    Awesome info on replacing cell addresses in formulas. I have never heard about Ctrl+` before. Thank you!

  11. T says:

    I have something inside a formula like:
    =sum(A1, A2*10) all over I now need to get rid of the *10 {=sume(A1, A2)} I thought to use the find replace trick above but with a blank in the replace but it then outputs just zeros. I thought I could trick it by doing *1 but then it just turns into =*1) with none of my references. Does anyone have an idea how to do this?
    The Ctrl+ trick is cool.

  12. Peter says:

    Thank you! This literally will save me hours and hours of time, and that's without losing my sanity in the process!

  13. Brigitte says:

    I have Sheet(1), Sheet(2), Sheet(3), etc ... Sheet(100).
    Then there's a summary tab where I want to recap information on all those different sheets. Is there anyway to create a formula on the Summary tab to get ='Sheet(1)'!B$29 copied down for all 100 sheets without having to change each sheet # within the formula by hand?

    • Hui... says:

      @Brigitte
      If you have a list of the sheet names in A2:A100
      In B2: =INDIRECT("'"&A2&"'!$B$29")
      Copy down

      or if you don't have a list of the sheets names you can make it up on the fly
      =INDIRECT("'sheet("&ROW()-1&")'!$B$29")
      Copy down

      • Brigitte says:

        Thanks for the suggestion. However, I copied your formula right back to my file and it didn't work. So I did it another way. I put the tab/cell reference in one cell and then did an =INDIRECT() to capture that information.

        K2="'Sheet("&L2&")'!B$29" which has a value of 'Sheet(1)'!B$29
        B2=INDIRECT(K2) which now has a value of 40 (contents on Sheet(1).

        Thank you!!!!

  14. Mohammed Ali says:

    Thank you ..

  15. Niharika says:

    Hi, Out of all the formulae, I wish to replace the formula which has generated 0 value with blank space? I am unable to do it with find and replace function,

    Please suggest.

  16. Rashed says:

    Thanks.

  17. Kevin says:

    Chandoo, you literally just saved me about 2 hours of work. I had a document with a daily report in two formats. The second formate just linked to all the appropriate cells in the other format (different sheets). This was 180 references that needed to be changed and I had to make this for a 4 week period (aka 28 different sheets at 180 references to change per sheet).

    Thanks so much.

  18. Brian says:

    I have tried this way and without using the Ctrl-` formula view
    Either way, I am trying to do something simple, but it won't let me.

    I have a bunch of cells with a simple math formula like
    =-(0.5*20)
    various values in each cell, multiplied by 20

    I simply want to change the multiplier globally from 20 to 25. But when I tell it to find *20 and replace it with *25, it replaces the entire cell contents with *25, rather than just replacing the *20 portion of the cell contents.

    Can anyone assist with this? Seems so simple, but Excel isn't letting me do it.

    • Hui... says:

      Search/Replace 20 or 20) with a cell Reference eg A1 or A1)
      Then put the value 25 in A1

      By using a * in the search it replaces all the text

  19. sadaqat says:

    how to find a specific cell's value in a column & replace replace it with another cell value i actually need a method to replace a data in ca column and replace with the value i have in a specific cell can i give a [ location ] of data to what i need to find and then give row or column range to where i need to find and the given value & then give a [ location ] of data to what i want to be replace with the find and replace by row & column range & than by specific criteria and than by specific location.
    please help.

  20. sadaqat says:

    how to find a specific cell’s value in a column & replace replace it with another cell's value.
    i actually need a method to find a specific cell's data in a column and replace it with the value i have in a specific cell.
    can i give a [ location ] of data to what i need to find and then give row or column range from where i need to find the given value & then give a [ location ] of data to what i want to be replace with.
    find and replace by row & column range & than by specific criteria and than by specific location.
    please help.

  21. sadaqat says:

    how to find a specific cell’s value in a column & replace it with another cell’s value.
    i actually need a method to find a specific cell’s data in a column and replace it with the value i have in a specific cell.
    can i give a [ location ] of data to what i need to find and then give row or column range from where i need to find the given value & then give a [ location ] of data to what i want to be replace with.
    "find and replace by row & column range & than by specific criteria and than by specific location."
    in more than 100 sheets in entire workbook
    please help.

  22. Juaninho says:

    This is a great tool, does anyone knows an easiest way??

    I'm working with a system that has over 59000 references... so every time the replace all is activated. I lose an entire day.

  23. sadaqat says:

    i actually needs to find cell number "D12" in column "D" and replace with Cell Number "B8" for example
    find what = Cell Number "D12" John McNamara
    find Where = in Column "D"
    Replace with = Cell Number "B8" Bieber D'Souza
    Replace Range = Column "D"
    In which Sheet = All Sheets in Work Book (more than 100 Sheets)
    Note: in every Sheet Cells Number "D12" & "B8" containing Different Employ Name but the find rang and replace rang are same in every sheet and find what cell number and replace with cell number are same also.
    please help!

  24. sara says:

    thank you. saved lot of time.

  25. Crystal says:

    Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

  26. Gerard says:

    Hi, I am trying to figure out how to use RE to find and replace several values in a column. Using find and replace does not work because of the values I am working with. I have a column with hundreds of rows that have a description of several operating systems and other info, which looks like this: Windows Server 2008 R2 Member Server Security Technical Implementation Guide; Windows 2008 Member Server Security Technical Implementation Guide; Solaris 10 10 SPARC SECURITY TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION GUIDE; and Windows Windows 2003 Member Server Security Technical Implementation Guide.

    I need to be able to find and replace (or basically curtail the descriptions) to be Windows 2008 R2; Windows 2008; Windows 2003; and Solaris 10. BUT when I run find and replace with just *2008*, it finds every instance, including the ones with R2 at the end. I need it to only change the ones with 2008 to Windows 2008 and the ones that have 2008 R2 to Windows 2008 R2. I know it is possible, but I have no clue on how to write a macro to do this.

    Thanks for your help,
    Gerard

  27. Paul says:

    Wickedly efficient workaround. Excel really is a powerhouse program, all you have to do is dig into it. Ctl ~ exposes the formulas, and Ctl H allows for the multi edit. Brilliant, Chandoo!

Leave a Reply