First some good news,
On 21st November, 2010, our little blog received its 10,000th comment!
Thank you so much for making this happen.
Those of you reading chandoo.org for a while know my penchant for comments. I have learned a lot of excel tips & ideas just by reading the comments you posted on this blog. I think comments are one of the best parts of this blog. So, naturally, I wanted to celebrate this milestone, with something big & awesome.
My intention was to download all the 10,000+ comments and play with the data to come up with something outstanding, like a dashboard. It took me 2 days to conceptualize and create this beauty.
10,007 comments visualized in an Excel Dashboard:
[click here for a larger version]
Summary of Findings from the Dashboard:
- Out of 10,007 comments, 8766 are comments left by people and 1241 are ping-backs (a comment made automatically by other blogs when they link to chandoo.org).
- Roughly 20% of comments are @ replies.
- 31 posts had more than 50 comments each. The maximum comments were 313 on the last visible cell poll.
- These 10,007 comments came from 2507 unique people. Top 20 commenters made 28% of comments.
- Median words per comment are 33. You said a total of 485,000 words so far. Impressive.
- There were only 5 days with zero comments in 2010 (as against 66 in 2008 and 15 in 2009).
- Fridays are most popular days for commenting with 20% comments coming in.
Learn How Dashboard is Constructed in a Crash Course:
I made this dashboard with lots of love & coffee. Of course, coffee wont magically turn data into in-cell charts. We need to arm twist our data and get the insights out ourselves.
That is why I made an hour long tutorial explaining how I constructed this dashboard. In the video I explain how I came up with the design, what formulas I used to cleanse & process the data, how various charts were constructed, what techniques I have used to put this together.
As this video is kind of advanced training on dashboards, I have decided to sell it. You can get a copy of the video & unlocked excel files for $37.
What you get with the purchase:
- A HD video explaining the dashboard construction process
- Same video in iPod compatible format for watching on the go.
- 2 Excel files, the original version & instructor version (unlocked)
Please note: You will not enjoy the video if you are an Excel beginner. Instead go thru Excel Dashboards page to equip yourself with necessary dashboard & charting skills before getting a training like this.
How is this Dashboard Made?
If you are curious to know which nuts & bolts are used in the dashboard, read up:
- The chart showing monthly trend of comments and day of week distribution are 2 different charts, one arranged on top of other.
- The word cloud showing relative frequencies of words used in comments is made using wordle. This is the only non-native Excel part of the dashboard.
- The Top 10 tables at the bottom are incell charts with some fancy colors.
- I have used pivot tables, SUMPRODUCT, SUMIFS, INDEX+MATCH, VLOOKUP formulas to process the data.
- Word counts are generated by processing the comment text using this technique.
Download the Dashboard File:
Click here to download a locked copy of the dashboard [mirror here]. You can examine the dashboard, but you can not alter it as it is password protected.
If you want an unlocked copy, you can get it by purchasing the video tutorial. Click here (or here).
A Big Thank You
A big, warm, cuddly thanks to you for making 10,000 comments. Everyday, your comments teach me new tricks on Excel & make me better at what I do. I am sure you feel the same about others comments.
Special thanks to top commenters – Jon Peltier (228), Hui (186), Jeff Weir (148), Robert (138), Jimmy (62), Rick Rothstein (60), Martin (58), Daniel Ferry (54), Dan l (53). Also, kudos to Stef@n for leaving a 900 word comment, the longest ever.
How do you like the dashboard?
Do you like the dashboard? Do you find it insightful? What modifications you would have made to it? Go ahead and share your ideas and tips with us. Please leave a comment.
PS: And get a copy of the training video if you work with dashboards a lot. I am sure you can pick up few tricks to become even more awesome.
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.