It is no secret that our readers are awesome. We have tons of creative, passionate & caring members in our community who just kick ass day in day out. Look at the comments in any post and you are going to find amazing display of skill, intelligence and mastery of Excel craft. To celebrate all this, we are going to dedicate this week (August 2nd thru 6th) as Reader Awesomeness Week.
What is Reader Awesomeness Week?
Through out this week, I am going to share excel workbooks, ideas, tips & tricks that our readers have submitted to me. First 3 days (Tuesday thru Thursday) I will be posting the following contributions I already received thru Email.
- Immigrants in Denmark – An info-graphic poster made in Excel by Faheem
- Travel Site Dashboard by Francis
- Rules for Making Better Models in Excel by Larry
On Friday, I will be posting all the tips, downloads submitted by you.
How I can Participate in RAW?
You have 3 ways to be awesome this week.
- Submit a tip
- Submit a downloadable workbook
- Submit anything else
Just go to this online form and fill up the details.
Are there any rules?
We, at Chandoo.org hate to be pedantic. But since, many of you are going to email and ask “is xxx ok?”, I am listing a few general rules:
- No personal / sensitive data: Make sure you randomize the data in your files and remove all personal data.
- Upload your work to a public site: Use a site like skydrive, rapidshare or google docs to upload your excel files or images. Then share the url.
- Be descriptive: Elaborate your tip so that it is clear for rest of us.
- Tell us your story: Dont just tell the tip, tell how you used it to be awesome. I want to know you and how you work.
- Repetition is OK: You can repeat an existing tip / idea on Chandoo.org as long as you add a new twist, new implementation to it.
- Copying is NOT OK: Do not copy others work or paste stuff from elsewhere.
Go on be awesome 🙂
Go ahead, contribute to Reader Awesomeness Week and show us how generous you are. Share your tips / downloads today.
If you cannot access the form:
- Leave a comment on this post
- or Email me your tip / story / workbook.
PS: Regular broadcast will be on hold this week. But I promise you the content you read this week is going to be much more better than what I write 🙂
Earlier Awesomeness:
We did a “reader contribution week” last year in May. We got 13 beautiful tips from our readers. You can browse through them here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
15 Responses to “Make a Bubble Chart in Excel [15 second tutorial]”
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!
Whyyyyyyyy?
The idea is to tell how to make a bubble chart. I got an e-mail from a reader recently asking how the scatter bubble is made. So I thought a 15 second tutorial would be a good idea to show this.
Did that email go "Dear Chandoo, I know that you scorn bubble charts, but if I don't do one in Excel for my boss then he'll fire my sorry ass, and my children will have to be sold for medical experiments in order for me to be able to afford the upgrade path to Excel 2010"?
If so, fair enough...it's all in the greater good 😉
Chandoo,
I am using excel 2003 and it is not working. The x axis is not the one that I enter in x axis column. Please help! Thanks.
Sorry, after few attempts, I managed to get the right result. I shouldn't select the title (header) of the table and select only the data to produce the right bubble chart.
What's wrong with bubble charts? Is there a better method for displaying scatter plots with lots of overlapping data points? Don't tell me you'd rather jitter!
@Sanwijay: Cool.
@Precious Roy: There is nothing wrong with bubble charts. Infact, it is the only way to show 3 dimensional data (x,y and sizes) without confusing your audience. Jeff is worried that people might misuse the chart. As with any chart, bubbles also have a place and time for using them.
I recommend using bubble charts to show relative performance various products in several regions and similar situations.
Also, human eye is notorious in wrongly estimating the bubble sizes (as we have to measure areas). See http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/07/28/charting-lessons-from-optical-illusions/
We can partially improve bubble charts by adding data labels, but if you have too many bubbles, the labels will clutter the chart and make it look busy.
I can't seem to find a way to plot more than ten bubbles on a chart and need to know how to add more
@KW.. why would such a thing happen. I am sure you can add more bubbles that that. Can you tell us exactly what you are doing...
Example table:
A B C (size)
Me: 25 30 15%
Him: 30 22 11%
Her: 12 30 20%
I am trying to make a bubble chart where the Y axis is A, the X axis is B, and the size of the bubble is C. There should be only 3 bubbles. I keep ending up with six (with the labels being only "Me" and "Her"). My goal is to have three bubbles, one representing each person. Clearly I am doing something wrong. Can you help explain...?
Hi,
I wanted to add data labels to the bubbles. Each bubble represents a different company name. Excel allows me to add the size, legend, x axis values and y axis values. How do I add instead- Company A, B, C, D for the bubbles?
youon you have to choice every data for every company..
ex:create bubble for A company,after that click right> add data label> adjust data labels :format data labels and choose : series name.
i hop u will succeed .
[...] we create a bubble chart with 2 bubbles. 1 for the actual mustache & 1 for target [...]
If we want bubble size to be controlled by one column, but the bubble labels to be controlled by another column, how can this be achieved?
many thanks!!!!