In the recent How to visualize survey results using Incell Panel Charts I have presented an easy way to create panel (or trellis / small multiples ) chart using Excel’s Incell Charting capabilities. That post is inspired from beautiful work done by Jon on Stacked Bar Chart Alternatives. Naomi B Robbins, who is an author and writer (visit her site: NBR – Graphics) has written a follow up article on this in which she suggested a dot-plot like this:
Jeff, who is a sweet fella from down under pointed that Naomi’s dot plots too can be incellified easily with excel. He suggested that I do a follow up post and show how an incell dot plot can be created for same data. I always look for opportunities to make you awesome in excel and Jeff’s request sounded just the right thing to do. So here is the incell dot plot for the same survey data – without further ado…
Incell Dot Plots in a Panel
The chart works exactly same as earlier one. Instead of REPTing | symbols, we used – (hyphens) and then a big black dot in the end (char code x25CF). Since today is a Friday, I am refraining from a lengthy post explaining how this is done. Instead, download the source file and learn yourself. Here is a clue…
book
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