If I need some charting inspiration, I always visit New York Times. Their interactive visualizations are some of the best you can find anywhere. Clear, beautifully crafted and powerful. Long time readers of Chandoo.org knew that I like to learn from visualizations in NY Times & redo them using Excel.
Today let me present you one such chart.
How the tax burden has changed over the years – Visual story by NY Times
First take a look at this story on New York times website. Go ahead and check it out, I will wait for you.
Back already. Good.
Now that you have seen a well presented story with the support of panel charts, let us learn how to re-create such charts using Excel.
Look at the tax burden Excel chart
Take a look at the excel implementation of this chart below. Read on to learn how to create this.
[click here to see larger version]
Recipe for creating this chart using Excel
We need below ingredients to make this chart using Excel
- Raw data
- One area chart and few lines on top
- Simple formulas
- One Slicer (to select an year)
- One large cup of coffee or whatever else that you gulp
So if you are ready, lets start cooking.
Step 0: Arrange data
This is a prerequisite for any charting exercise. Although we can work with data in any shape, for quick results, arrange your data in this format:
In the example file you will find data for overall tax burden for all 9 tax brackets in the years 1980-2010.
Step 1: Create an area chart from all the data
Simple, select tax bracket & tax percentage rows and create an area chart. This is how it should look.
Step 2: Insert 2 columns after every tax bracket in your source data
Very simple, just add 2 blank columns after every tax bracket to your source data. This will change your chart to,
Step 3: Adjust data settings so that blank cells are treated as gaps
Right click on the chart, go to Select Data > Hidden & Empty cells
Specify that all blank cells should be treated as gaps. See below.
Now, your chart should look like this:
Step 4: Add a line to the chart & format it
Although our chart looks almost like NY Times chart, we still need to show a line on top. For this,
- Go to your data, reselect all the tax burden %s and copy them.
- Come back to the chart, select it and paste. (more on this)
- Excel will add this new data as another series to chart
- Right on this new series, choose Change series chart type
- Select Line chart
- Format the chart so that it looks like below.
Step 5: Remove grid lines & fake them using additional series
Excel chart’s grid lines always show up behind the data. For our chart, we want them on top. So let just delete grid lines and fake them using additional lines on the chart.
For this,
- In your data, add 9 extra rows at bottom (why 9? because we want to show one grid line for every 5% and the maximum we have is around 45%)
- Fill first row with 0.05, second with 0.1, third with 0.15… ninth with 0.45
- Copy all these and paste them in the chart. You should have nine lines across the chart.
- Now, format each line so that it looks like a dull white line with dashes.
- When you are done, the final output should look like this:
Step 6: Remove horizontal axis (x-axis) labels & fake them too
Again, horizontal axis labels produced by Excel are useless for us. So we will create our own.
- First delete the existing axis.
- Then add a text box to the chart and place it where axis should be.
- Type the values 1980 few spaces 2010.
- Adjust the font size to 7pt.
- Now play with the text box until you are satisfied for one tax bracket.
- Then copy paste it 8 more times and adjust their positions.
Although we could automate this step, it felt un-necessary as the years are not going to change.
Our chart is almost ready
At this stage, our chart looks like below.
It is almost ready, but we need few more additions.
- We need to add labels to first & last point in each tax bracket.
- We need a mechanism so that user can select a particular year.
- When any year is selected, we need to show that year’s tax burden %.
Adding labels for first and last points
This is done by adding one more series of values. This new series (lets call it label-first-last) will have values for only 1980 & 2010. Everything else will be NA().
The formula I used to generate this series is,
=IF(OR(year=1980,year=2010),taxburden,NA())
Once this series is added, we just format it so that only markers are shown (no line) and then add data labels. Format the labels to show in 0% format. Adjust their size and position.
Also add arrow shaped boxes on top to label each tax bracket.
Enabling year selection thru Slicers
[This works only for Excel 2010 or above]
In a blank sheet type the years 1980 thru 2010. Select them and create a pivot.
Once the pivot is ready, insert a slicer for the years field.
For detailed steps on slicer creation see this illustration.
Figuring out which year is selected
Once the slicer is ready, we need to figure out if user made a selection thru slicer. To do this,
- Use a simple formula to check how many values are shown in the pivot table (ex: COUNTA(pivot!A:A) )
- If only one value is shown, then extract it by referring to first row item in pivot (=pivot!A4)
Adding labels for selected year
Once we know which year is selected, we can easily create one more series that has NA() for all values except selected year. The rest you know.
Final outcome – Tax burden over the years chart using Excel
Download this example & Play with it
Click here to download the tax burden chart. Play with it to learn more. Examine the formulas in “Data” sheet & scroll down on “Chart” sheet for step by step instructions.
Do you like this chart?
I really loved how NY Times has been able to tell a very good story by using multiple panel charts. These are great way to examine multidimensional data and understand what is going on.
What about you? Do you like this chart? Please share your thoughts and ideas using comments.
More such charting inspiration
If you are looking for some fresh charting inspiration & ideas, you are at the right place. Check out these examples to get started:
- Introduction to Panel Charts & How to make them in Excel
- Usain Bolt vs. Rest of runners – Interactive visualization in Excel
- Impact of Grammy award on sales – Grammy bump interactive chart
- Visualizing world education rankings – excel chart
- Facebook Privacy policies as a panel chart
- More charts & visualizations
Do you want to create powerful & insightful charts like these?
If you want to learn how to create these types of charts, consider enrolling in our Excel School program. Be warned, you will become unusually awesome in Excel by going thru our course 🙂
25 Responses to “Shift Calendar Template – FREE Download”
Hi Chandoo,
your recent postings include only Excel 2007 templates. Unfortunately the company I work at still runs Excel 2003. Is it possible to get your awesome files in other excel version as well?
Thanks so much for your great excel stuff!
Is it possible to do this for shifts with hours instead of days? To organise a three shift day?
Thanks in advance,
Stelios
In my organization there are 45 employees i need split then into three shifts ex:A shift:14,B shift:14,C shift:14 and week off:3 kindly help me on this.
@Masthan
You need to understand what rules your company has for the various shifts / roster combinations
Chandoo, I once did a shift control spreadsheet for my team. I put one person in each line, the columns were the days. I put a shift code in each cell indicating in which shift that person should work, or if the person were out that day. I have two codes for being out. One is for vacations and one is to compensate days worked in weekends. This way I was able to count how many persons I have in each shift, how many were on vacations and how many were out compensating (that's the term we use here) weekend worked hours.
Later I included the possibility of a person be in two lines one for normal hours other for overtime. This is mainly used for planning purposes. If you would like I can send you an example. The only problem of this spreadsheet is that we don't have a person view, only this consolidated view.
Hi George, I would like to have a copy of your spreadsheet if you can share it.
Thanks in advance, Chuck
Hi Chandoo,
Where is the code located ? is it VBA ? If so , how do you hide it ? Or it is .NET ?
Thx
@Idan
.
No VBA or code, it is all done with Mirrors.
Only Joking,
.
But there is no VBA or code,
It is all done with Named Formulas and Lookups.
Have alook at the cells in the calander area and Named Formulas in the Formulas, Name Manager Tab.
How can i calculate between two or more different workbooks? Please, reply me as early as possible.
@Anand
Open the workbooks you want to link to
Start a formula = and click and change between workbooks as required.
You can use the View, Switch window menu to change workbooks mid formula
The format for using workbooks is
=[Workbook.xlsm]Sheet1!$A$1
or
=SUM('[Book2.xls]Sheet1'!$A$1:$D$10)
etc
Hi Chandoo,
I am working with a call centre wherein i ned to update at the month end 20 to 30 employees login hours which are defict to track it at the month end is very difficult is there any template which can be made to track that why on a particular day a guy who needs to be on calls was why not on calls.
Thank you so much Chandoo. This is really helping me. As usual, you rock.
What's FortyTwoDays and Calendar in Name manager?
Both are unused and FortyTwoDays doesn't make any sense.
I have a SQL db that contains records of events scheduled/completed on a particular date. Can this method ous building a calendar be used to display those events on the respective day?
Positively awesome!
I'm attempting to help a friend create a schedule for adult classes - and of course its not"paid help". Here is the scenario:
20 classes, instructor, room#, student class size, start date, number of class days (need to subtract weekends)
class
instructor
room
students
start
#days
PATH
karen
201
21
01/01/13
11
BILLING
jane
401
15
01/12/13
13
MEDISOFT
mike
301
11
01/25/13
9
he'd like to see these classes show up in different colors within the same month's calendar chart. He can draw it, but I'd like to see it done automatically through data, and I just can't visualize it, but I KNOW this will work - can you help?
Jan 🙂
Dear chandoo,
Try many way to download still can't access. Any way we want to try out 3 shifts with 3 guys in a group .eg Group A Morn, Group B Night and Group C Rest. And every each group must work on sunday to take turns. In fact we are security teams so that's why sunday is required to work. Pls guide and show how to put in the working calendar. Thank you in advance.
I've been trying to copy and/or recreate this to use in a workbook I'm doing for the transportation department I'm working for. I need to have the calendar on the first sheet in my document (it has graph's from data on another sheet). I'm trying to use it to track (with the conditional formatting) accidents and injuries. I've redone the conditional formatting to do 4 different accident types (no injury, near miss, OSHA recordable injury and work loss injury), but when I enter the formula's you have in the calendar portion where it says "DateOfFirst-FirstWeekDay" I can't figure out how you did that. Are you able to help?
I would like to use Excel to solve the following problem for a community work. I want to create a Driver schedule for a given month from a pool of volunteers for a community service. Each of these volunteers can drive only on specific days in a week. I would like to populate the driving schedule for each weekday with primary, secondary and tertiary drivers in a random fashion so that I do not overburden one person. I would greatly any help you can provide.
Hi chandoo,
Thanks for your valuable effort for create this template and let me know how to add multiple employees in the the Roaster.
Hi Chandoo,
This article on shift roaster is very helpful. Could you please let me know how i can use the same for n number of resources who work 24/7, considering their leaves and holidays?
Thanks,
Savitha
Hi Chandoo,
This article on shift roaster is very helpful to all. Could you please let me know how i can use the same if I want to add for some more shifts, since the color is not getting change if I add more shifts like 4,5 etc.,
Thanks,
Murali
nice post
How can I change the date to 2017 under Shift Data worksheet.
solution 1:
mydata=B2:C16
stoplist=E2:E8
=LET(RNG,A2:A16,SMR,C2:C16, F,(RNG=E2)+(RNG=E3)+(RNG=E4)+(RNG=E5)+(RNG=E6)+(RNG=E7)+(RNG=E8),SUM(SMR)-SUM(SMR*F))
=LET(RNG,A2:A16,SMR,C2:C16,RH,N(B2:B16=B2), F,(RNG=E2)+(RNG=E3)+(RNG=E4)+(RNG=E5)+(RNG=E6)+(RNG=E7)+(RNG=E8),TOT,SUM(SMR)-SUM(SMR*RH*F),SUM(SMR*RH)-SUM(SMR* RH*F))
ALTERNATE SOLUTION
=SUM(C2:C16)-SUM(FILTER(C2:C16,ISNUMBER(BYROW(A2:A16,LAMBDA(a,TOROW(SEARCH(a,E2:E8),2))))))
=SUM((B2:B16=B2)*(C2:C16))-SUM((ISNUMBER(BYROW(A2:A16,LAMBDA(a,TOROW(SEARCH(a,E2:E8),2))))*(B2:B16=B2)*(C2:C16)))
let
Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="Table1"]}[Content],
#"Replaced Value" = Table.ReplaceValue(Source,null,";",Replacer.ReplaceValue,{"Column1"}),
#"Transposed Table" = Table.Transpose(#"Replaced Value"),
#"Removed Other Columns" = Table.SelectColumns(#"Transposed Table",{"Column1", "Column2", "Column3", "Column4", "Column5", "Column6", "Column7", "Column8", "Column9", "Column10", "Column11", "Column12", "Column13", "Column14", "Column15", "Column16", "Column17", "Column18", "Column19", "Column20", "Column21", "Column22", "Column23", "Column24", "Column25", "Column26", "Column27", "Column28", "Column29", "Column30", "Column31", "Column32", "Column33", "Column34", "Column35", "Column36", "Column37", "Column38", "Column39", "Column40", "Column41", "Column42", "Column43", "Column44", "Column45", "Column46", "Column47", "Column48", "Column49", "Column50", "Column51", "Column52", "Column53", "Column54", "Column55", "Column56", "Column57", "Column58", "Column59", "Column60", "Column61", "Column62", "Column63", "Column64", "Column65", "Column66", "Column67", "Column68", "Column69", "Column70", "Column71", "Column72", "Column73", "Column74", "Column75", "Column76", "Column77", "Column78", "Column79", "Column80", "Column81", "Column82", "Column83", "Column84", "Column85", "Column86", "Column87"}),
#"Merged Columns" = Table.CombineColumns(#"Removed Other Columns",{"Column1", "Column2", "Column3", "Column4", "Column5", "Column6", "Column7", "Column8", "Column9", "Column10", "Column11", "Column12", "Column13", "Column14", "Column15", "Column16", "Column17", "Column18", "Column19", "Column20", "Column21", "Column22", "Column23", "Column24", "Column25", "Column26", "Column27", "Column28", "Column29", "Column30", "Column31", "Column32", "Column33", "Column34", "Column35", "Column36", "Column37", "Column38", "Column39", "Column40", "Column41", "Column42", "Column43", "Column44", "Column45", "Column46", "Column47", "Column48", "Column49", "Column50", "Column51", "Column52", "Column53", "Column54", "Column55", "Column56", "Column57", "Column58", "Column59", "Column60", "Column61", "Column62", "Column63", "Column64", "Column65", "Column66", "Column67", "Column68", "Column69", "Column70", "Column71", "Column72", "Column73", "Column74", "Column75", "Column76", "Column77", "Column78", "Column79", "Column80", "Column81", "Column82", "Column83", "Column84", "Column85", "Column86", "Column87"},Combiner.CombineTextByDelimiter("|", QuoteStyle.None),"Merged"),
#"Split Column by Delimiter" = Table.ExpandListColumn(Table.TransformColumns(#"Merged Columns", {{"Merged", Splitter.SplitTextByDelimiter(";", QuoteStyle.Csv), let itemType = (type nullable text) meta [Serialized.Text = true] in type {itemType}}}), "Merged"),
#"Added Prefix" = Table.TransformColumns(#"Split Column by Delimiter", {{"Merged", each "|" & _, type text}}),
#"Replaced Value1" = Table.ReplaceValue(#"Added Prefix","||","|",Replacer.ReplaceText,{"Merged"}),
#"Split Column by Delimiter1" = Table.SplitColumn(#"Replaced Value1", "Merged", Splitter.SplitTextByDelimiter("|", QuoteStyle.Csv), {"Merged.1", "Merged.2", "Merged.3", "Merged.4", "Merged.5", "Merged.6", "Merged.7", "Merged.8"}),
#"Removed Columns" = Table.RemoveColumns(#"Split Column by Delimiter1",{"Merged.1"}),
#"Removed Duplicates" = Table.Distinct(#"Removed Columns")
in
#"Removed Duplicates"