Use Advances vs. Declines chart to understand change in values

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Lets say you are responsible for sales of 100s of products (which belong to handful of categories). You are looking at sales of each product in last month & this month. And you want to understand whether sales are improving or declining by category. How would you do it?

Turns out, this is not a difficult problem. In fact, this question is asked every day & answered using Advances vs. Declines chart.

You may have seen this chart in financial newspapers or websites. Shown below, Advances vs. Declines chart tells us how many items have advanced & how many have declined.

Advances vs. Declines chart - Creating it using Excel

When should you use Advances vs. Declines chart?

As you can see, advances vs. declines chart does not give low level details about actual movement of values. Instead, it gives you a sense of what is going on. Use it in below situations:

  • To get a feel of how values have changed over time.
  • When you are dealing with data that constantly changes (sales, number of customers, defects etc.)

Create Advances vs. Declines chart in Excel

You can easily create this chart in Excel from raw data. Just follow below tutorial.

Step 1: Get the data & arrange it

You need at least 4 columns of data – item, category, previous value, current value

Once we have these, calculate % change in 5th column. Arrange data like below:

Data for advances vs. declines chart

Step 2: Calculate Category-wise summaries

First list all unique categories in a column. Then using COUNTIFS formula, calculate the number of products declining & advancing.

The formula to count number of products going down by more than 10% is,

=COUNTIFS(Sales[category], Category name, Sales[% change], “<10%”)

[Related: Introduction to Excel SUMIFS / COUNTIFS Formulas]

Using COUNTIFS formula to calculate number of declines & advances

Step 3: Calculate % break-ups for the chart

Once all the numbers are calculated, you can easily calculate the % split.

Calculating Declines & Advances in percentage

NOTE: Make sure you negate the % values for declines. This will ensure that our chart shows stacked bars on both sides of axis.

Step 4: Create a stacked bar chart from this data

Once all the numbers are in place, just select them and create a stacked bar chart. Your output should look like below:

Stacked bar chart from advances and declines percentage data

Step 5: Adjust chart series order if needed

You may notice that, our stacked chart bars are not in correct order. Excel would have plotted <10% and >10% series before <0% and >0% series. To fix this:

  1. Right click on the chart
  2. Go to Select Data
  3. Now, select the series area
  4. Using up / down buttons adjust the order of series
  5. Done!

See this demo to understand:

Adjusting chart series order - advances vs. declines chart using Excel

Step 6: Adjust the colors & format the chart

Unleash your creativity and format the chart as you see fit. Make sure you add legend (otherwise the chart becomes very difficult to read).

Advances vs. Declines chart - Completed

And you are done!

Download Advances vs. Declines chart template

Click here to download the chart template. Examine the formulas & chart settings to understand this better.

Do you use Advances vs. Declines chart?

I use variations of this chart often in my dashboards & reports. These charts are very concise and present a lot of information about distribution of changes.

What about you? Do you use advances vs. declines charts? How do you create them? Share your experiences & techniques using comments.

Looking to advance your charting knowledge?

If you want to one up your Excel awesomeness quotient & create kick-ass charts, then you are at the right place. Check out below tutorials & see how deep the rabbit hole goes:

Recommended: If all these sound exciting, you will incredibly benefit from our Excel School program, where we teach advanced charting & data analysis skills. Click here to know more & join us.

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26 Responses to “FIFA Worldcup Excel Spreadsheets [Roundup]”

  1. J. J. says:

    Nice roundup! Do you know of any one-page spreadsheets which will be updated by an administrator after each game? Would be nice to be able to print out the latest results whenever I feel like checking them as I probably won't be following closely every day.

    I actually haven't tried any of the above ones yet, but I thought I'd mention this one that I found which makes a nice one-page form you can fill in dynamically. http://exceltemplate.net/sports/world-cup-2010-schedule-and-scoresheet/

  2. Diego Garcia says:

    I would like to recommend you these one: http://www.anotagol.com/
    You can choose your interface language (english, spanish, italian, portuguese, german or french) and your country for the timezone of match. I like it very much.

  3. [...] Passend zu gerade laufenden Fußball-WM gibt es auf Chandoo.org alles wissenswerte über Excel-Anwendungen für den Fußball-Fan. [...]

  4. Rohit1409 says:

    Great!!!

    I strongly recommend this :

    http://www.en.excel-soccer-2010.de/downloads

    Chandoo how you found this ...

  5. Chandoo says:

    @Rohit.. really beautiful file. I missed it during my research. Now, I recommend it. 🙂

  6. Mourad Louha says:

    Hi Chandoo - thanks for the recommandation 🙂 - Regards

  7. [...] Excel, then print it on the other side of your Match Schedule from step 2 above. There are several other Excel spreadsheet templates you can download, but this is probably the only one-page version you can find; plus, it [...]

  8. Robert says:

    Does anybody know how to re-create this(?): http://www.marca.com/deporte/futbol/mundial/sudafrica-2010/calendario-english.html
    ...or do you know where a template can be found? I am DYING to have something like this on my site. When I found it, I had been looking for the longest time for a circular calendar. I found a couple that weren't adequate. Then I stumbled upon this one and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. If anyone can lead me in the right direction, I would be eternally grateful!

    Thanks in advance!
    Robert

  9. Chandoo says:

    @Robert...

    Doing something like that is a lot of work. You can probably get it done with some hired help from a flash developer.

  10. Pedro Wave says:

    @Robert, the World Cup flash in the Spanish Marca newspaper is impresive, but not much as my own animated spreadsheet with the Goals of 2010 World Cup South Africa in Excel that I just published into my blog:
    http://pedrowave.blogspot.com/2010/06/goals-of-2010-world-cup-south-africa-in.html

    Download from here:
    http://cid-6b219f16da7128e3.office.live.com/view.aspx/.Public/Goals%20South%20Africa%20Animated.xlsx

    And start to enter the goals of the rest of matches.

  11. Neil says:

    Has anyone seen, or made, a Spreadsheet where you can record the scorers and see a 'top scorers' chart. Would be a nice enhancement

  12. Chandoo says:

    @Neil... checkout this one http://www.inflexionary.com/sports/world-cup-2010-excel

    it uses macros to fetch scores from web (and provides very comprehensive analysis too)

    @All.. Thanks for the comments. I have updated the post with few more links now.

  13. Sergio Mathias says:

    Hi,
    Check this dashboards too:
    http://dashboards.org/world-cup-dashboards-and-visualizations/
    😉

  14. [...] Here is a collection of FIFA World Cup Spreadsheets if you are more in to that sort of thing. | [...]

  15. [...] Cup fever is here!In FIFA Worldcup Excel Spreadsheets Roundup, Chandoo has some links to useful World Cup tracking workbooks. Only one of them (the first one) [...]

  16. [...] World Cup fever is here!In FIFA Worldcup Excel Spreadsheets Roundup, Chandoo has some links to useful World Cup tracking workbooks. Only one of them (the first one) [...]

  17. Hey, you missed ours! It has everything you need and more, but not a whole pile of silly extras (National Anthems, etc).  I'll be making another one for the 2014 world cup.  We had over 4000 hits on it!

  18. Neil says:

    @Michael Harwood.

    Where is it then? You should have posted a link  

  19. phillip says:

    Sie sollten an einem Wettbewerb teil zu nehmen für einen der besten Blogs im Web. Ich werde empfehlen Sie diese Seite!
    Google translation: You should take part in a contest for one of the best blogs on the web. I will recommend this site!

  20. [...] and welcome to the forum, Maybe these similar spreadsheets might give you a few initial ideas: FIFA Worldcup Excel Spreadsheets [Roundup] | Chandoo.org - Learn Microsoft Excel Online If you have specific areas / formulae / layout choices for parts of your spreadsheet that you are [...]

  21. Petros says:

    Calling all football fans around the globe! The biggest football festival will kick off on the 12th June 2014 and everyone is placing their bets of who will have the honour of lifting the golden trophy.

    Use our free interactive Excel templatel to predict the World cup finalists ! No macros !

    http://www.spreadsheet1.com/world-cup-2014-free-excel-prediction-template.html

  22. marten says:

    I also made a Worldcup-tracker, with MS Access, which can also generate reports in Excel
    e.g. a match-schedule with locations on y-axis and dates on x-axis, see:
    http://worktimesheet2014.blogspot.com.es/2014/05/excel-with-match-schedule-for-2014-fifa.html
    and:
    http://worktimesheet2014.blogspot.com.es/2014/05/match-access-app-to-track-world-cup.html

  23. Vivek Ranjan says:

    where can i find raw data in excel file format of fifa world cups (1930-2014)

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