Earlier in the week Chandoo presented Give more details by showing average and distribution
At the top of the post was a small screen capture from Amazon.com showing a 5 Star chart showing that Twilight had a 3.5 Star Rating (way over-rated if you ask me).
I received an email shortly afterwards from Rajiv, “How can I make one of those charts ? ” with the Stars Circled
It’s actually very simple and this post will show you how.
The Technique
The technique involves putting a mask in front of a single bar from a Bar Chart
The mask has a plain background and has cut-outs where the Stars are, which are transparent and so only the bar chart shows through in those areas which are cut out.
Lets Do It
On a worksheet we need a cell where we have a Rating Value, lets use B2
Make the value in Cell B2, 5
Select the cell B2 and Insert Chart
Insert a Bar Chart (Clustered Bar)
Delete the following chart objects
- Title
- Legend
- Major Grid Lines
Select the Horizontal Axis
Format Axis
Change the Horizontal Axis Scale to
- Minimum 0
- Maximum 5
Delete the Horizontal and Vertical Axis
Move the chart and resize the Bar to your requirements
Change the Bar’s Fill to suit
Set Border color to No Color
Insert Picture
Import the 5 Star mask attached here
Position the mask in front of the charts Bar
With the mask selected shift the Right hand side and then left hand side so that you can just see the edges of the bar.
Check the placement by trying the numbers from 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 0.1 in B2
You should see all the stars perfectly when the placement is correct
Select the Chart and 5 Star Mask together
Use Shift while selecting each one
Group the Chart and Mask together, so that they can’t be moved
Your are free to shift and resize this combined object on your worksheet as required
Vertical Charts
A Similar technique can be used for Vertical Charts using a Column Chart instead of a Bar Chart
Masks
The masks used here were made in CorelDRAW, but can be made in any Drawing/Paint program like Paint.NET, that allows you to save PNG’s with Transparency effects
The masks consists of:
- 5 Stars which have no outline color and are transparent
- 1 Rectangle which is White with no Outline color
The 6 objects are then Joined enabling the holes of the Stars to show through the White Rectangle
Using this technique any shape can be used as a mask
I have included the following masks for you to practice with or use:
5 Stars Mask with Outlined Stars,
If anybody knows how to join objects together in Excel to make holes through them as required here, Please let us know in the comments below:
Thermometer Charts
The above technique is great for application to Thermometer Charts, where the Thermometer can take on all values from 0 to 100% or 0 to $200,000
or whatever you require.
Files
All the above examples are shown in one file which you can download here or here for the 2003 Version
Download the Waves and Chameleon 2007 or Waves and Chameleon 2003 examples
Extensions of the Technique
This technique can be extended in a number of areas
The Thermometer chart above shows one such area
The other is applying multiple Masks to multiple Bars/Columns in one chart, But I’ll leave you to practice that.
Limitations of the Technique
Two main limitations of this technique are:
Scaling
As Excel charts are scaled, Excel internally decides what space should be between the Plot Area, Titles and the edge of the Chart Area. This is not maintained constantly and hence the Plot Area may scale at a different ratio to the Chart area and overlying mask.
If this happens Ungroup the Chart and mask and reset ecverything at the new size.
Mask Color
The mask has a Fixed color, in the above examples it is white.
The mask cannot be colored in Excel to Match the background color of the Worksheet if it isn’t white.
So a new Mask will need to be made.
What Do you Think of this Technique
What Do you Think of this Technique?
How else can you see this technique being extended?
Let us know in the comments below:
12 Responses to “29 Excel Formula Tips for all Occasions [and proof that PHD readers truly rock]”
Some great contributions here.
Gotta love the Friday 13th formula 😀
Great tips from you all! Thanks a lot for sharing! bsamson, particularly you helped me on a terribly annoying task. 🙂
(BTW, Chandoo, it's not exactly "Find if a range is normally distributed" what my suggestion does. It checks if two proportions are statistically different. I probably gave you a bad explanation on twitter, but it'd be probably better if you fix it here... 🙂 )
Great compilation Chandoo
For the "Clean your text before you lookup"
=VLOOKUP(CLEAN(TRIM(E20)),F5:G18,2,0)
I would like to share a method to convert a number-stored-as-text before you lookup:
=VLOOKUP(E20+0,F5:G18,2,0)
@Peder, yeah, I loved that formula
@Aires: Sorry, I misunderstood your formula. Corrected the heading now.
@John.. that is a cool tip.
Hey Chandoo,
That p-value formula is really great for a statistics person like me.
What a p-value essentially is, is the probability that the results obtained from a statistical test aren't valid. So for example, if my p value is .05, there's a 5% probability that my results are wrong.
You can play with this if you install the Data Analysis Toolpak (which will perform some statistical tests for you AND provide the P Value.)
Let's say for example I've got two weeks of data (separated into columns) with the number of hours worked per day. I want to find out if the total number of hours I worked in week two were really all the different than week one.
Week1 Week2
10 11
12 9
9 10
7 8
5 8
Go to Data > Data Analysis > T-Test Assuming Unequal Variances > OK
In the Variable 1 Box, select the range of data for week 1.
In the Variable 2 Box, select the range of data for week 2.
Check "Labels"
In the Alpha box, select a value (in percentage terms) for how tolerant you are of error.
.05 is the general standard; that is to say I am willing to accept a 95% level of confidence that my result is accuarate.
Select a range output.
Excel calculates a number of results: Average (mean) for each week's data, etc.
You'll notice however that there are two P Values; one-tail and two-tail. (one tail tests are for > or .05), the number of hours I worked in week two is statistically equivalent to the number of hours I worked in week one.
So here’s a way you might want to use this. You put up a new entry on your blog. You think it’s the best entry ever! So you pull your webstats for this week and compare it to last week. You gather data for each week on the length of time a visitor spends on your website. The question you’re trying to prove statistically is whether there’s an average increase in the amount of time spent on your website this week as compared to last week (as a result of your fancy new blog post). You can run the same statistical test I illustrated above to find out. Incidentally, it matters very little to the stat test whether the quantity of visitors differs or not.
Anyhow, the Data Analysis toolpack doesn't perform a lot of stat tests that folks like me would like to have access to. In those cases I have to either use different software, or write some very complicated mathematical formulas. Having this p-value formula makes my life a LOT easier!
Thanks!
Eric~
Fantastic stuf..One line explanation is cool.
Thanks to all the contributors
OS
Take FirstName, MI, LastName in access (you can fix it to work in excel) capitalize first letter of each and lowercase the rest and add ". " if MI exists then same for last name:
Full Name: Format(Left([FirstName],1),">") & Format(Right([FirstName]),Len([FirstName])-1),"") & ". ","") & Format(Left([LastName],1),">") & Format(Right([LastName],Len([LastName])-1),"<")
I teach excel, access, etc etc for a living and i have my access students build this formula one step at a time from the inside out to show how formulas can be made even if it looks complicated. Yes I know I could just do IsNull([MI]) and reverse the order in the Iif() function but the point here is to nest as many functions as possible one by one (also I illustrate how it will fail without the Not() as it is)
Extract the month from a date
The easiest formula for this is =MONTH(a1)
It will return a 1 for January, 2 for February etc.
if in a column we write the value of total person for eg. 10 if we spent 1.33 paise each person then how we get total amount in next column and the result will in round form plzzzzz solve my problem sir................... thank u
@Anjali
If the value 10 is in B2 and 1.33 paise is in C2 the formula in D2 could be =B2*C2
If the values are a column of values you can copy the formula down by copy/paste or drag the small black handle at the bottom right corner of cell D2
kindly share with me new forumulas.
How to convert a figure like 870.70 into 870 but 871.70 into 880 using excel formula ? Please help.