Egil, one of our alert readers from Norway sent this to me in e-mail, which I swear, I am not making up – A Fancy Gauge Chart. See the e-mail and chart yourself.
To make it more industrial-like, I’ve added:
1. Brushed metal background picture
2. Gradient fill format to the pie shares
3. A gradient fill. semi-transparent square (to make glass effect)
4. Sqrew-head pics
The original gauge chart template behind Egil’s industrious effort caused enough debate among our community.
I think gauges are a poor way to visualize data, but I don’t completely shoot them down either. Gauges connect well with certain type of audience / situations – like kids, informal communications, conveying just one point etc. But it would be disastrous to have a gauge chart on your weekly dashboard to the CFO, no matter how industrial-like it is.
Download Egil’s version of the Gauge
Click here to download the fancy gauge chart template. Thanks Egil for your idea. I think it is pimptastic.
Anyways, here is a fun challenge:
Download the gauge, and pimp it in your style. Take a screenshot, upload it somewhere and link it here. I want to see how you would pimp it.
And if you are furious to see a gauge chart on this blog, remember, and I am not making this up either, today is Friday. Have fun folks.
PS: yes, I am HUGE fan of Dave Barry, and no, I am not making this up.
Added later: Just to be clear, I think Egil‘s implementation is pretty cool and shows what is possible with excel.
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