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.













5 Responses to “Preparing Profit / Loss Pivot Reports [Part 2 of 6]”
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I am not getting sound from the videos. I have checked all the settings and spent several hours searching the Internet to no avail.
Has anyone else had this problem?
Is there anyway to get the Grand Total to be broken out in the same fashion as the items above it? Â For instance, if you have in column 1, widget a, widget b, and have their sales by month in column 2, I'd like to see the grand total also be by month, for widget a & b combined.
I can't get anything other than a single line for the grand total, rather than the same format as the data above.
Widget A    Month   Sales
          Jan     100
          Feb     200
Widget BÂ
          Jan     150
          Feb     250
Grand total - here I would also like to have Jan, Feb.
          Jan     250
          Feb     450
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