Recipe for a Donut Bar Chart

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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:

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12 Responses to “29 Excel Formula Tips for all Occasions [and proof that PHD readers truly rock]”

  1. Peder Schmedling says:

    Some great contributions here.
    Gotta love the Friday 13th formula 😀

  2. Aires says:

    Great tips from you all! Thanks a lot for sharing! bsamson, particularly you helped me on a terribly annoying task. 🙂

    (BTW, Chandoo, it's not exactly "Find if a range is normally distributed" what my suggestion does. It checks if two proportions are statistically different. I probably gave you a bad explanation on twitter, but it'd be probably better if you fix it here... 🙂 )

  3. John Franco says:

    Great compilation Chandoo

    For the "Clean your text before you lookup"
    =VLOOKUP(CLEAN(TRIM(E20)),F5:G18,2,0)

    I would like to share a method to convert a number-stored-as-text before you lookup:

    =VLOOKUP(E20+0,F5:G18,2,0)

  4. Chandoo says:

    @Peder, yeah, I loved that formula
    @Aires: Sorry, I misunderstood your formula. Corrected the heading now.
    @John.. that is a cool tip.

  5. Eric Lind says:

    Hey Chandoo,

    That p-value formula is really great for a statistics person like me.

    What a p-value essentially is, is the probability that the results obtained from a statistical test aren't valid. So for example, if my p value is .05, there's a 5% probability that my results are wrong.

    You can play with this if you install the Data Analysis Toolpak (which will perform some statistical tests for you AND provide the P Value.)

    Let's say for example I've got two weeks of data (separated into columns) with the number of hours worked per day. I want to find out if the total number of hours I worked in week two were really all the different than week one.

    Week1 Week2
    10 11
    12 9
    9 10
    7 8
    5 8

    Go to Data > Data Analysis > T-Test Assuming Unequal Variances > OK

    In the Variable 1 Box, select the range of data for week 1.
    In the Variable 2 Box, select the range of data for week 2.
    Check "Labels"
    In the Alpha box, select a value (in percentage terms) for how tolerant you are of error.

    .05 is the general standard; that is to say I am willing to accept a 95% level of confidence that my result is accuarate.

    Select a range output.

    Excel calculates a number of results: Average (mean) for each week's data, etc.

    You'll notice however that there are two P Values; one-tail and two-tail. (one tail tests are for > or .05), the number of hours I worked in week two is statistically equivalent to the number of hours I worked in week one.

    So here’s a way you might want to use this. You put up a new entry on your blog. You think it’s the best entry ever! So you pull your webstats for this week and compare it to last week. You gather data for each week on the length of time a visitor spends on your website. The question you’re trying to prove statistically is whether there’s an average increase in the amount of time spent on your website this week as compared to last week (as a result of your fancy new blog post). You can run the same statistical test I illustrated above to find out. Incidentally, it matters very little to the stat test whether the quantity of visitors differs or not.

    Anyhow, the Data Analysis toolpack doesn't perform a lot of stat tests that folks like me would like to have access to. In those cases I have to either use different software, or write some very complicated mathematical formulas. Having this p-value formula makes my life a LOT easier!

    Thanks!

    Eric~

  6. Balaji OS says:

    Fantastic stuf..One line explanation is cool.
    Thanks to all the contributors

    OS

  7. Locke says:

    Take FirstName, MI, LastName in access (you can fix it to work in excel) capitalize first letter of each and lowercase the rest and add ". " if MI exists then same for last name:
    Full Name: Format(Left([FirstName],1),">") & Format(Right([FirstName]),Len([FirstName])-1),"") & ". ","") & Format(Left([LastName],1),">") & Format(Right([LastName],Len([LastName])-1),"<")

    I teach excel, access, etc etc for a living and i have my access students build this formula one step at a time from the inside out to show how formulas can be made even if it looks complicated. Yes I know I could just do IsNull([MI]) and reverse the order in the Iif() function but the point here is to nest as many functions as possible one by one (also I illustrate how it will fail without the Not() as it is)

  8. Johan says:

    Extract the month from a date
    The easiest formula for this is =MONTH(a1)
    It will return a 1 for January, 2 for February etc.

  9. anjali says:

    if in a column we write the value of total person for eg. 10 if we spent 1.33 paise each person then how we get total amount in next column and the result will in round form plzzzzz solve my problem sir................... thank u

  10. Hui... says:

    @Anjali

    If the value 10 is in B2 and 1.33 paise is in C2 the formula in D2 could be =B2*C2

    If the values are a column of values you can copy the formula down by copy/paste or drag the small black handle at the bottom right corner of cell D2

  11. sajid says:

    kindly share with me new forumulas.

  12. Biswajit Baidya says:

    How to convert a figure like 870.70 into 870 but 871.70 into 880 using excel formula ? Please help.

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