The folks at Washington Post made an interesting chart to understand whether winning a Grammy award makes any difference to album sales. Go ahead and browse it if you have not already seen it. Go, I will wait.
Are you impressed?
I really liked this chart. This is what I liked about the chart,
- It tells a story. [why charts should tell a story]
- It is an ego chart. We would all instantly search for our favorite artists and learn about how Grammy award changed their album sales.
- It is a simple chart. No clutter, no gaudy colors, just a bunch of lines and the story is out there.
- It lets you play. You can hover your most over an artist to see their sales before and after the award, and how much % bump they got.
In fact, I liked the chart so much that I wanted to make it in Excel.
Here is what I came up with:
How does the chart work?
1. Data for the chart: The Washington Post guys did not give any details about the source of data. So I manually typed the data myself by looking at their chart. It took a few minutes. But totally worth it. I put the data in 5 columns – Year, Artist, Album, Before and After sales.
2. The chart: The chart is an XY Scatter plot. I took numbers from 0 to 37 (there is a total of 19 years of data – from 1992 to 2010. Each year has 2 data points – before and after). For even numbers I used the before sales and odd numbers I used the after sales. For this I wrote simple INDEX formula with a bit of MOD(). Again, nothing too fancy.
3. Getting the gaps in the chart:
This is the tricky part. By default, if you have 4 points (0,98000),(1,135000), (2,155000), (3, 427000) in the XY Scatter plot, Excel will draw a line connecting all 4. But we want to have a gap between first 2 points and second 2 points. How?!?
Thankfully, there is a simple workaround. You can insert blank rows between 2nd and 3rd row of your data and instantly you will see a gap in the chart. Repeat the same for remaining 18 points.
4. Year Selection & Highlighting
This is done using conditional formatting & Worksheet_SelectionChange Event Macro. First, I wrote a simple macro that would change the named range valSelectedYear to the selected year. The code is very simple. You can examine it in the download file.
Then, I used the valSelectedYear to drive the conditional formatting that would fill blue color across the column. As you can guess, the chart is transparent (ie no fill color for both chart area and plot area). So whatever color the cells beneath the chart have, they will show up in the chart too.
5. Creating the Dynamic Legend:
Here I have used picture links to fetch the artist image dynamically. (well, I was too lazy to download the actual images of Nora Jones and U2 etc. So I just used clip art).
Then, I used text boxes to make the dynamic legend, same as the technique demonstrated in smart chart legends & excel product catalog articles.
6. Formatting and aligning everything:
Once the basic setup is ready, I just moved and re-arranged the chart, legend box etc. so that everything looks right.
Download the Chart Workbook:
Click here to download the workbook in Excel 2007 format.
(click here to download the file in Excel 2003 format. I have not tested this, but it should work alright)
Mirror location for the files.
Please note that you must enable macros to select years.
Recommended Reading to make charts like these
- Picture Links – What are they and how to use them in Excel?
- Dynamic Chart Legends in Excel
- INDEX Formula – Examples, Tips & Tricks
- Conditional Formatting – Examples, Tutorials, Tips
- Further Examples,
How would you have made this chart?
I liked the original chart design and interactivity provided by Washington Post people. So I closely mimicked the same my Excel chart. But you may want to visualize the same data in a different way. So go ahead and download the workbook. It has data (hidden in columns A thru G). Play with it and make your own chart. Post them in comments.
I would love to see how you would have visualized the same information. Especially this type of data has a lot of relevance in business situations, so it would be fun to see your views and learn from each other. Go ahead and chip in.
Thanks to Washington post for the chart. Hat tip to Flowing Data for the link.
20 Responses to “Untrimmable Spaces – Excel Formula”
Hi Chandoo,
First of all, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! Wish you and your family another fruitful year ahead.
To answer your question: Power Query is the best way to trim. 🙂
Btw, if Power Query is not available, then formula would absolutely do... but did you forget to mention also Char 32?
One more question: Is the trailing minus meant to be a negative number? Maybe only the sender knows... 🙂
Cheers,
I just see your PQ way, it is amazing, I think it is the most simple way.
No idea how it did it?
I know these spaces can be a real pain but these days I advise Excel users to learn and use Flash Fill and that will learn what to do pretty quickly.
Highlight range to be cleaned. Then, in Replace, hold down the Alt key and type 0160. Replace with nothing.
I accomplished this by writing a macro to go through all the possible unprintable characters. Looped through the range.
@Steve
Brute force works just as well, its just slower
I use a different method here. First, I will copy the data from Excel and paste it in a notepad. In Notepad, I will do a Find Blanks (Space " ") and Replace (Empty) with nothing.
Then you can copy the data from Notepad and paste it back to Excel which will be a perfect number as you desire.
But Thanks for the formula. Its probably the 2nd out of 8 tricks as Chandoo mentioned. Waiting for the rest among 8 from other users 🙂
Hi....
You don't always need notepad for that. I use the Find/Replace is Excel works just fine.
I don't understand the x's. Why weren't they removed in the formula? Or are they part of some sort of numeric formatting that I'm not familiar with? I saw how you handled the non-breaking spaces and the dashes, but am confused about what role the x's played in all this.
Thanks!
Hi Andrew ,
The xs have been used solely to demarcate the actual data text ; thus , without the x in place at the end of text , as in :
x 4,124,500.00 x
it would be impossible to know that there are unwanted trailing characters , in this case , after the last 0.
These xs are not part of the original data text , nor are they used in the formulae ; they are put in only so that readers can visualize the individual items of data as they are in practice. Think of them as imaginary delimiters.
Oh, that makes sense! Thank you for the explanation. I had a feeling it was something along those lines.
You can type this character using the Keys Alt+0160.
Very useful to replace this Character using Find and Select resource.
For many years, my jobs have included ETL tasks and I built this macro to help long, long ago. I tweak it every now and again. Many co-workers, past and present, have it wired to a button on their toolbar.
Sub Clean_and_Trim()
'CAUTION: Strips leading zeroes -- do not use on zipcodes, etc.
If Application.Calculation = xlCalculationAutomatic Then
Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual
Revert = 1
ElseIf Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual Then
Revert = 0
End If
For Each Cell In Selection
For x = Len(Cell.Value) To 1 Step -1
If Asc(Mid(Cell.Value, x, 1)) = 160 Then
Cell.Replace What:=Chr(160), Replacement:=" ", LookAt:=xlPart, MatchCase:=True
End If
If Asc(Mid(Cell.Value, x, 1)) = 32 Then
Cell.Replace What:=Chr(32), Replacement:=" ", LookAt:=xlPart, MatchCase:=True
End If
Next x
If Cell.Value "" Then
Cell.Value = Application.Clean(Application.Trim(Cell.Value))
End If
Next
If Revert = 1 Then
Application.Calculation = xlCalculationAutomatic
ElseIf Revert = 0 Then
Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual
End If
End Sub
This is awesome! What if you have several characters you need to have removed? What would be the easiest way as I can imagine there are several ways.?
# - 35
$ - 36
- 62
/ - 47
, - 44
. - 46
" - 34
: - 58
This is typical case of a Fitbit data export to Csv file. Each number has CHAR160 as thousand separator.. how smart Fitbit, thank you 😉
By the way, i prefer to copy the character, and use find and replace.
Sometimes it happens if you copy a table from outlook and paste it in excel. When you apply formula on those cells you will get error. What i use to do is
copy one character that looks like space,
select the entire range,
go to Find and replace,
Paste the copied character in Find option
Leave the replace option unfilled..
click on replace all..
All the errors shall be converted in to proper values..
Process looks lengthier.. but it is one of the simplest method
If Clean, Trim, and Substitute, or Find and Replace does not complete the job, I usually enter a value of 1 in an empty cell. Copy the Value of 1, Highlight the range of text numbers, and Paste Special, Values, Multiply. This site is great!
You can use Dose for Excel Add-In that can quickly clean huge data with one click besides more than +100 new functions and features to add to your Excel to save time and effort.
https://www.zbrainsoft.com
Hi,
I have a problem in excel. The sheet attached herewith.
TABLE CONFIG 2/6
A B C D E F G H
1 WEIGHT1 43,599 WEIGH2 62500 WEIGHT3 77000 WEIGHT4 66,500
2 DEDUCTION1 15,000 DEDUCTION1 15,000 TEMP 0 DEDUCTION2 11,005
3 RESULT 58,599 RESULT-1 77,500 RESULT-2 77,000 RESULT-3 77,505
4 RESULT SUBSTRACT 0 0 0
5 REQUIRED VALUE 77,500 77,000 77,505
Note: 1- RESULT (58599) IS TO BE DEDUCTION EITHER FROM D4 OR F4 OR H4 WHICHEVER IS MOST
LEAST CELL AMONG RESULT-1 OR RESULT-2 OR RESULT 3.
2-HENCE, RESULT VALUE $B$3 IS TO BE PRESENTED ON CELL EITHER D4 OR F4 OR H4 WHICHER IS
MOST LEAST VALUE
3-FORMULA =IF(E8<H8,$B$9,IF(E8<J8,$B$9,IF(H8<J8,$B$9,IF(H8<E8,$B$9,IF(J8<H8,$B$9))))))
CREATED ON CELL D4,F4 & H4 DID NOT WORK.
PLS FOR YOUR HELP.
THANK YOU
@R
Why not ask the question in the Chandoo.org Forums
https://chandoo.org/forum/
You can attach a file there