It is very easy to customize Excel ribbon and save time. You can make a new ribbon or modify an existing one with new group of commands. This can be a huge productivity boost for people using MS Office applications.
How to create your own ribbon in Excel 2019 / 365 / 2016 / 2013 / 2010:
Customizing ribbon is as simple as customizing your coffee at Starbucks.
- Right click on ribbon area and select “customize ribbon” option.
- Now, add a new tab (or group or both) – see below for illustration.
- Add a few commands (or buttons) to your new ribbon
- Click ok and you have a sparkling new ribbon ready.
10 things you should know about ribbon customization
This is how the customize Excel ribbon screen looks.
I have highlighted 10 items on the screen. Read thru below 10 points to master ribbon customization.
- Use New Tab button to create a new ribbon tab.
- Use New Group button to add a new group of commands to an existing or new ribbon.
- Rename button helps you to change the name of an existing custom group or tab.
- Once you add a group / tab, you have to select it to add items to that group / tab.
- You can choose the type of commands you want to add to your ribbon tab / group. You can also add any macros as well (sweet!).
- Now select the command you want to add to your group
- Click on “Add” button to add the command to your ribbon tab / group.
- You can use “Remove” button to remove any commands from custom tabs / groups.
- Use the up / down arrow buttons to move your ribbon tab / group up or down. (For eg. you can move your custom tab to first, ie before home tab).
- You can export your ribbon customizations and re-use them in other computers (both ribbon and QAT settings will be exported).
Ribbon and QAT Customization – Few Tips:
Use “Hide Command Labels” option to shrink your ribbon groups
See the below illustration to understand what I mean.
Customize tool ribbon tabs to save a ton of time:
By default, when you go to “customize ribbon” screen, you only see main tabs. But you can also customize tool specific tabs. For eg. I use only a handful of chart formatting options and all of these are spread across 3 different tabs – design, layout and format. So I combined all the options I use regularly to come up with a simple ribbon tab like this:
As you can guess, the above ribbon tab appears only when I am formatting a chart.
Add groups of commands to QAT:
You can now add a group of commands (for eg. all alignment options) to Quick Access Toolbar to improve your productivity.
Minimize ribbon with a click:
Press the ^ icon you see next to help icon to instantly collapse / expand ribbon. You can also use CTRL+F1 keyboard shortcut to do the same.
Export Ribbon Settings
In 2010 and later you can Export your Ribbon & QAT to a file that can be imported to another computer, or after reinstalling Office
In the Options dialog > Customize Ribbon (or Quick Access Toolbar) options > Import / Export button at bottom of both dialogs.
Ribbon Customization Gotchas!
While ribbon customization is a great move ahead for Excel in particular and Office apps in general, there are a few gotchas. Beware of the following to avoid un-necessary troubles.
- When you add a group or tab, excel doesnt ask you for a name. Make sure you click on “rename” button to change the name to something you remember.
- You cannot add commands to an existing excel defined group. You can however add groups to existing ribbons.
- Even if you try to make a group with exactly same commands, the group may look different.
- The ribbon and QAT customizations you do are local to your installation of excel only. You have to export the customizations and import them before they work on other comps.
What is your opinion about ribbon customization?
I am very happy to see the possibilities of ribbon customizations. It can improve productivity and simplify a lot of things.
What about you? How are you planning to customize your ribbon? What tips and ideas you have to share with us? Please tell me using comments.
31 Responses to “Beautiful Budget vs. Actual chart to make your boss love you”
Would be considerably easier just to have a table with the variance shown.
On Step 3, how do you "Add budget and actual values to the chart again"?
There are a few ways to do it.
Easy:
1) Copy just the numbers from both columns (Select, CTRL+C)
2) Select the chart and hit CTRL+V to paste. This adds them to chart.
Traditional:
1) Right click on chart and go to "select data..."
2) From the dialog, click on "Add" button and add one series at a time.
One more way to accomplish it is just select the columns into chart. Press Ctrl+C and then press Ctrl+V
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work for me in Excel 2010. The "Var 1" and "Var 2" columns cannot combine two fonts to display the symbol and the figure side-by-side.
Secondly, there is no option to Click on “Value from cells” option when formatting the label options. The only options provided are Series Name, Category Name or Value.
@TheQ47... the emoji font also has normal English letters, so if you use that font, then you should be ok. I am assuming your computer doesn't have that font or hasn't been upgraded for emoji support.
Reg. Excel 2010, you can manually link each label to a cell value. Just select one label at a time (click on labels, wait a second, click on an individual label) and press = and link it to the label var 1 or var 2.
I am using excel 2010, please explain how to apply Step 12
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Hi Neeraj,
"Value from cells" option is only available in Excel 2013 or above. In older versions, you have to manually adjust the label value by linking each label seperately.
Read this please: https://chandoo.org/wp/change-data-labels-in-charts/
Sir, you are just awesome.
Your creativity has no limit.
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Hi Chandoo,
I just found your website, and really love it. It helps me a lot to be an Excel expert 😉
Currently I am facing with a problem at step 11:
Var1 Var2
D30%
A5%
B0%
B4%
B7%
C10%
C13%
D27%
I42%
Though at mapping table, I used windings, here formula uses calibra. How I can change it? I am able to change only the whole cell. In this case numbers will be Windings too.
Thanks for your help!
Hi Mariann... Welcome to Chandoo.org and thanks for your comment.
If you wanted to use symbols from wingdings and combine them with % numbers, then you need to setup two labels. One with symbol, in wingdings font and another with value in normal font. Just add the same series again to the chart, make it invisible, add labels. You may need to adjust the alignment / position of label so everything is visible.
[…] firs article explains how you can enhance your charts with symbols. You can simply insert any supported symbol into your data and charts. To some extend you can […]
You're a good person, thank you to share your knowledge with us, I will try to do in my work
Great visualization of variance. My question is that is this possible in powerbi?
How would you go about it?
HELLO, WHY CANT I FIND VALUES FOR LABELS IN EXCEL 2013
Dear chanddo sir,
What to do if we have dynamic range for Chart. How this will work. can you able to make the same thing works on dynamic range.
Sir Chandoo,
Good Day!
First, I'd like to say that I am very grateful for your work and for sharing all these things with us.
I tried to do this chart but it seems that the symbols don't work with text (abs(var%),"0%") unless we keep the Windings font style.
The problem is, it converts the text into symbol as well and you wont see the 0% anymore. I'm using Windows 7.
WOW - Segoe UI Emoji
This is the greatest discovery for me this month 🙂 Thanks for sharing.
Here's my two-cents:
https://wmfexcel.com/2019/02/17/a-compelling-chart-in-three-minutes/
Sir This is awesome chart, and very easy to made because of your way to explain is very simple , everyone can do. Thank you
one problem i am facing, I hv made this chart , but when i am inserting data table to chart it is showing two times , how can i resolve this
in this chart when i am adding new month data for example first i made this chart jan to mar but when i add data for the apr month graphs updated automatically but labels are missing for that new month
Hi Renuka,
Please make sure the formulas for labels are also calculated for extra months. Just drag down the series and set label range to appropriate address.
So I am playing with the Actual chart here - but amounts are bigger than your - you have 600 as Budget - my budget is 104,000 - is there a way to shorten that I am unaware of
thank you - I LOVE YOUR SITE
Thanks for the tips and tricks on Excel. In the Planned versus Actual chart examples, you use multiple values (ex. multiple Categories in above). How can this be done when we have only 1 set of values? For example if I have only this:
Planned Actual
SOW Budget 417480 367551
How can I create a single bar chart like the one above?
Thank you Chandoo.
This one is just perfect for my Quarterly Review presentation on Operational Budget against Actual Performance for the Hospital I'm currently working with.
Just Subscribed today (10 minutes ago)
Is there a way to make the table of data into a pivot table to be able to add a slicer for the graph due to many different categories and months?
Hi, I tried to modify you template with something appropriate for me, and I found a problem. this template was modified by me started with excel 2010, then 2016 and finally 2019. Same thing - somehow appear an error - or didn't show the emoticons for positive percentage or doubled the emoticons for some rows. I suspect to be from excel. if is need it I can sand you my xlsx for study. Please help if you can.
Hi Chandoo,
Could you please check the Var Formula in Step1. You have mentioned budget-actual and when i did this i got different values but when reversed like actual-budget i got the actual value what you have demonstrated in step1.
Please share your view.
This is a great chart (budget vs. actual). However, in trying recreate it, I cannot color in the UP Down bars individually, and they all become formatted with the same color. I'm using Office 365. Look forward to the feedback.
Thanks.
Dan
pls explain in detail step 7
While in the Excel sheet you have used following formula for Var
Var = Actual - Budget
But
in the note, you have written
Var = Budget - Actual
Good Presentation and Data information.thank you so much chandoo.