Last week, we learned how to visualize Suicides vs. Murders data using Interactive charts in Excel.
William, one of our readers, took this technique and applied it to Stocks. He emailed me because he has some formula issues with the stock data. Once I solved the problem, I asked him, “Can I share this with our readers?” and he is too happy to agree. So here we go.
Interactive Analysis of Stocks using Excel
(Data as of 20SEP2011, 4PM EDT, from Yahoo Finance)
How does this Work?
This workbook is just a clone of Suicides vs. Murders visualization with different data. The only change is that, here we used LARGE and MATCH formulas instead of COUNTIF formula to sort the list.
Learn more about this technique is from KPI Dashboard Sorting article.
Download Stock Performance Analysis Workbook
Click here to download the workbook & play with it. Just change the data & formulas in “Share Data” worksheet to modify this.
Do you Like This?
I really liked how William put this together. It is simple and yet, quite powerful.
What about you? Do you like this technique? Are you planning to use it anywhere? Please share your ideas using comments.
8 Responses to “Introducing PHD Sparkline Maker – Dead Simple way to Create Excel Sparklines”
This looks like it could be very useful for a project I'm putting together right now, thank you so much. Quick & silly question, how do I copy & paste the sparkline as a picture?
Question answered. For anyone else:
Select chart>Hold Shift key & select Edit/Copy Picture>Paste
[...] more information about PHD Sparkline Maker, please read this article and to learn more about Sparklines, read this article from Microsoft Excel 2010 blog. Also there [...]
Am I right in thinking that the y-axis is set automatically by excel?
That makes it possible to get the column chart not to start at zero.
Andy - yes, it is currently set to 'auto', which defaults to a zero base for positive values, but you can change that by left-clicking the chart, then choosing (in Excel 2007):
"Chart Tools/Layout/Axes/Primary Vertical Axis/More Primary Vertical Axis Options"
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: When manually editing a chart's minimum/maximum axis values, PLEASE be sure there's a valid reason and that doing so won't skew the message shown by the data (e.g. by exaggerating differences). If in doubt, go back and read Tufte. (W.W.T.D.?)
[...] gridlines, axis, legend, titles, labels etc.) and resize it so that it fits nicely in a cell [example]. This is the easiest and cleanest way to get sparklines in earlier versions of excel. However this [...]
thanks for the work creating the template!!!!
looks good