Today lets close some gaps.
Recently I saw this interesting chart on Economist Daily Charts page. This chart is based on World Economic Forum’s survey on how women compare to men in terms of various development parameters. First take a look at the chart prepared by Economist team.
So what are the gaps in this chart?
This chart fails to communicate because,
- All country charts look same, thus making it difficult to spot any deviations.
- We cannot quickly compare one country with another on any particular indicator.
- It does not provide a better context (for eg. how did these countries perform last year?)
But criticizing someone’s work is not awesome. Fixing it and making an even better chart, that has awesome written all over it. So that is what we are going to do.
Fixing the gaps in Gender Equality chart
First take a look at the improved chart. Play below video.
Step 1: Getting the data for this chart
Although folks at Economist have not included source data, the good people at WEF have provided detailed PDF reports (2013, 2012) where all the data is naked and waiting for us, analyst to pounce and go nuts.
I copy pasted table in to Excel.
While 2012 data loaded alright, 2013 loaded in a weird fashion.
So we move to step 2.
Step 2: Cleaning the data
I feel dirty every time I clean a piece of data 😉
But I also like it (cleaning part, not feeling dirty part). I learn some techniques when I am working with messy, sticky and disorganized data sets.
The 2013 data is pasted in to Excel in this format.
From this, we need to transform our data to:
If we know magic, we could point our wand at the table and say something like, Mobiliarbus Datum.
Alas. We are muggles. So lets rely on the most potent magic we know: Excel formulas. Using INDEX + MATCH combination, we can easily convert 2013 data to the format we want.
The actual formula to fetch overall rank (2nd item in the list for each country) is,
=INDEX(gaps2013,MATCH($B5,gaps2013,0)+1)
Explanation:
- gaps2013 is the range where all the 2013 gender gap survey data is copied
- B5 contains the name of the country for which we want the data.
- +1 because we want to get rank, not country name.
For more, read how to get VLOOKUP + 1 item.
Step 3: Set up form controls
Now that we have sparkling clean data, lets create necessary form controls on our output sheet.
We need 2 controls.
- A combo-box (drop-down) control so that user can select what field to sort the report on.
- A set of option buttons to specify which average to compare.
The combo-box is set up to use the list of values shown aside.
Related: Introduction to Excel Form Controls.
Lets link these to 2 cells, named sortCol & avgType on a different sheet. Call this sheet as calculations. All our formulas will go here.
Step 4: Find sort order based on the selected column
This is the tricky part. I am going to give highlights here and point you to a link where you can learn more.
- Fetch the column we want to sort in a range of cells.
If sorting a number column:
- Make the column unique by adding a very small running fraction.
- This ensures that if our data has duplicates, still our formula works.
- Find the sort order of each item using RANK() formula.
- Refer to Sorting KPIs using Formulas article for more on this technique.
If sorting a text column:
- Find the sort order using COUNTIF() formula.
- Refer to sorting text using formulas article.
Step 5: Re-arrange all data in the sort order
Using INDEX formula, rearrange all data according to the sort order.
Step 6: Calculate % change values
Based on 2012 & 2013 scores, calculate % change and place them in the last 5 columns.
Step 7: Calculate averages
Calculate averages (both G20 & all country values) for all the columns and place them somewhere on your calculations worksheet.
Related: Calculating the average of every nth item.
Step 8: Create charts
Here is the process for creating chart for Overall Score (2013). The same process is used to create all the charts.
- Select all the numbers in overall score column.
- Create a bar chart
- Select vertical axis and press CTRL+1 to format it.
- Select “Categories in reverse order.”
- Adjust series gap to 25%
- Set horizontal axis min to 0 and max to 1 and remove the axis.
- Remove vertical axis, grid lines
- Remove title
- Fill chart background & plot background with no color.
- Set chart outline to no outline.
- And you are done!
See the demo aside to understand the process.
Step 9: Add average as secondary series to the chart
Calculate which average to use in the chart based on the avgType value. And fetch that number to a cell.
Now add average to the chart as a line. This can be done by,
- Adding average point to the chart as second series
- Converting this series to scatter (XY) plot.
- Adjusting the X & Y values of the average point.
- Adding 100% positive (or negative) error bar
- Formatting the error bar to make it look like a line.
- Removing any axis, grid lines added in the process.
Step 10: Oh wow, this is getting long. Have a coffee
I guess this is now a fairly long process. But closing gender gaps (or gaps in the gender gap chart) is never easy. So have a cup of coffee or tea. Rejuvenate and come back.
Step 11: Create all other charts
Follow the same process and create rest of the charts.
One easy way to create rest of the charts is,
- Copy the first chart and paste it elsewhere.
- Select the bars and edit the range address in the formula bar.
- Select the average point and edit that too.
- Adjust axis if needed.
- And you are done!
Step 12: Put everything together
Create a nice table like structure in your output tab and put everything together. Re-size and position the charts as needed. Make sure the colors are nice. Add conditional formatting to highlight column being sorted and you are done!
Missing Steps
I have deliberately omitted a few steps in this process to keep it simple. For those of you with a keen eye:
- Using conditional formatting data bars for the % change column.
- Turning on / off last column in the report based on sort selection using conditional formatting.
- Adding data labels to the country names based on the sort selection.
Download this Excel chart
Click here to download this Excel chart. Play with it. Explore the chart settings, formats, formulas and controls to understand it better.
Conclusions – What does the Gender Inequality Chart say?
After all this analysis, 2 things are clear.
- In most countries, women have high equality with men when it comes to health or education.
- The real gap seems to be in politics & economical development of women.
While this may seem like common sense, it also means, World Economic Forum people should measure inequality on some more parameters. There is little point tracking and analyzing indicators related to health or education (especially in OECD or Western countries).
What do you think?
Want to fill gaps in your Excel knowledge
While no one appreciates gender inequality, we all love awesomeness inequality. There is nothing wrong in wanting to be more awesome than your peers. And here is how you can be unmatched…
- Using Panel charts to understand data
- Spot matrix charts – alternative to radars
- Analyzing performance of stocks using charts
- Suicides & Murders data – interactive analysis
- Visualizing world education rankings
- Survey data analysis with in-cell charts
Want some challenge… How would you analyze this data?
If you want some challenge, go ahead and download the file. It has all the data for 2012 & 2013. Analyze it and share with me your charts. You can email me at chandoo.d@gmail.com or upload your files somewhere and post the links in comments. I would love to see how you can analyze and present this data.
49 Responses to “Interactive Pivot Table Calendar & Chart in Excel!”
Excellent post again from awesome chandoo.org
This is one of the post to evident, without using macros we can create excellent charts using available excel options.
Slicer is one of the useful option in excel 2010 .. excited to see more options in excel 2013.
Regards,
Saran
http://www.lostinexcel.blogspot.com
Nice one chandoo............... great work done.....
Cool article. Only downside was that I didn't see at first that I needed 2010. Guess I still have to wait awhile before getting to try this out myself.
I consider myself an Excel expert, but you constantly amaze me with posts like this. Fantastic calendar!
Good post, like this little trick!!
How to not show the value in the cell
format the cell to custom with the below
;;;
Could you add lists of holidays to be transferred to the calendar days?
Two lists would be needed: 1) for the holidays that stay fixed (eg, CHristmas), and 2) for the holidays that move around (eg, Thanksgiving).
Such lists would be prepared externally, and the program would transfer their information to the appropriate days.
Wow! This is something amazing. I am going to do some practicals with this and show a sales trend on this. As we have our sales plans weekly basis, this should impress by boss when put in dashboard. Cool.
And thanks1
Chandoo you have a knack of getting on to these great looking very creative ideas!
One thing with calendars I have seen before is not catering for able to enter notes or appointments or project milestones. But with this one it's easy enough to add the extra lines as you have done for the chart concept and link to this other type of info.
For 2003 we could replace slicers with a validation style dropdown couldn't we?
Chandoo, you are awesome;) i was using calender to show my reports, but i had made all months and then underneith date shows the value, man its really awesome . i am going to use this format for my reports.. only draw back for me is i am using 2007. hence no slicer.. may be have to modify with out slicer.
Why not use =weeknum() for the weeknum column?
Great tricks! I love trying to reproduce the charts myself to get the hang of 'em. This one was great.
My only issue is getting the VBA in the year object to refresh the data. I used the VBA provided at the link, and, I can see it in the Macros tab, but, when I click the spinner the data does not update. Any tips?
Thx!
3G
^^Ignore this! NOT ENOUGH COFFEE YET.
I forgot about the "Assign Macro" option
:-s
Just started at chandoo - this is great!
I opted to use the formula =IF(F6>F5,G5,G5+1) for my weeknum - worked for me (I didn't get all the way through the example, since I'm running Excel 2007 - so don't know if that'll affect anything later in the example). I'm open to comments on this alternative approach.
Thanks for creating this website!
VC (Excel student).
Very cool - but now I'm even more excited for the new time controls for Excel 2013!
Great calendar...
I wonder whether we can make a school calendar (Class, subjects, teachers) using this calendar, assuming the weekly plan is duplicated across the year.
I would love to be a part of creating a class schedule...I'm attempting to help a friend (gratis) to do just that - can you point me in the right direction or provide a sample of sorts?
[...] Wow – what do you think of the interactive calendar chart demo above? To achieve this impressive effect you must have Excel 2010 because it utilises slicers, which is a feature introduced in Excel 2010. Find out how this treasure was created on Chandoo’s page. [...]
Hello Chandoo,
Great works! I learn a lot from this website. Here is the problem I met when I follow your tutorial: once I run and save this cool pivot calendar chart , the size of excel file will increase every time. Could you let me know how to figure it out? Thank you for your time in advance.
An excel chart-fan from China.
I already figured it out.
wow, love the calendar, i'm a newbie, found this site and it's amazing.
Got it mostly figured out, but could do with help with your named range 'tblchosen'
I can build the pivots, link the calendars together but can't see how to use index(tblchosen...) to pull through the productivity figures
appreciate any help
thanks
Great. Miss the Today button. Will try and figure a way to add this to the file.
I want to start the week on Monday, not Sunday (MTWTFSS). Re-arranging the calendar tab works however, any month where the 1st is a Sunday starts on the second and totally omits Sun 1. I have been tinkerign for a while, but can't seem to figure this out.
Changing F2 on the 'Calcs' tab to 2 so that the week starts on Monday works.
Cutting & pasting Sunday on the 'Pivot Calendar' tab and moving all cells up 1 row works.
However, using April 2013 for example, you lose the 1st off of the pivot calendar so that the month starts on 2 April. What should happen is the first row should only show Sun 1 April and then the next row starts Mon 2 April. Still can't fugure out where the problem lies.
"Further Enhancements:
Adjust week start to Monday: Likewise, you can modify your formulas to adjust weekstart to Monday or any other day you fancy."
I have tinkered with this previously with no success, does anyone know which formulas require tinkering, I have only succeeded in breaking this in an effort start a week on a Monday.
[...] Interactivo Artículo original var dd_offset_from_content = 50; var dd_top_offset_from_content = 0; Tags: 2013, calendario, [...]
Completely off topic, but how do you create those animated pictures in your tutorials? It is not a movie (like the Youtube movie), so what software do you use to create such high quality "animated" pictires? Thanks
Jeroen
the animated pics are called Animated Gifs
they are made using Camtasia
Refer: http://chandoo.org/wp/about/what-we-use/
This is fairly easy to do just using calendar formulas, which would be quicker, and doesn't need VBA? Am I missing something?
[...] on how to generate an interactive calendar using pivot tables. Please check out Chandoo’s Interactive Pivot Table Calendar & Chart in Excel before reading this, as I want to go through how I used his method to adapt a calendar which was [...]
Great tip shared by you... howevr would appreciate if you could mention in your tricks about excel version. The example above would work only in excel 2010 and above I believe. Please help me if there is any way we can use the tip in excel 2007 as well..
Many Thanks,
Regards,
FK
Hi, I'm going to give this a shot, but one small question before I do. Can a linked cell be updated based on the date that is selected from the calendar? The calendar is really cool and this would make is especially good to use (and easy and fast).
Regards,
swissfish.
This post is awesome, and using your instructions, I was able to get this to work with a pivot table that pulls directly from a Project Server database. It was a bit complicated to get the day to sum correctly, but I managed to finagle it. I hope you don't mind if I link back to you when I post my instructions.
Thanks for giving me a starting point for this!
[...] http://chandoo.org/wp/2012/09/12/interactive-pivot-calendar/ [...]
This is great, and pretty much everything I was looking for.
However, I already have a large spreadsheet, and I want to include your worksheets in it. I copied all the worksheets and the Module 1, but I can't get it to work. What else do I need to transfer / update please?
Hello there, is it possible to use this pivot to produce a calendar style chart, with returns multiple data per date, which on the calendar then, when clicked links to the data to provide more background information? What do you think? I'd love if I could pivot when i need. thanks, m
Hi, did you ever figure out how to do this? I would love to find a way...
This is amazing and will work well for my calendar project! My question is, how can I expand the calendar to fit a standard sheet of paper?
Wow - this is so creative. I'm taking the basic idea and building a reservation calendar.
Question: How do you get the month and year slicers on a different page than the pivot tables? I'd like to have my final calendar on a separate page from the pivot.
[…] http://chandoo.org/wp/2012/09/12/interactive-pivot-calendar/ […]
This is perfect...is there a way to add notes/tasks to the individual days?
Excel will not let me insert blank rows between lines in the pivot table. I am use Excel 2013 - is there a pivot table tools command that must be used?
I can create the pivot table calender with a year spinner & month slicer but I do not see how to display the the attendance information that I have in the original data table.
Thank you for the wonderful post and I am sorry for my lack of understanding...
Excellent!
Please show me how to add an alternative calendar to this calendar, Chinese or lunar calendar (and by lunar I don't mean phases of the moon), like what they still use in Asia
Thanks
Christopher
[…] Wow – what do you think of the interactive calendar chart demo above? To achieve this impressive effect you must have Excel 2010 because it utilises slicers, which is a feature introduced in Excel 2010. Find out how this treasure was created on Chandoo’s page. […]
Hello my name is Maurice, excuse me for my further request, but believe me, without your help priprio not know how to solve this problem.
So: always using a chart positioned on an excel sheet I wanted to match each square (series) to a single cell, to create a perpetual calendar.
Now everything works fine; except that for a fact, and it is this: In the calendar as you well know some numbers may not be apparent until certain conditions, which I solved by writing this "= O code (AA5 = DATE ( $ H $ 1; MONTH ($ AD $ 12) +1; 1)) and the game and done.
Now I would like to achieve the same thing using the Chart; How can I do to make this happen! let me also just a practical example so that I can understand all the rest then I'll do; Thanks Greetings from A.Maurizio
Link Program : Link: https://app.box.com/s/lhqva3eji0xcf2nmk8lxyki88tt1mi5t
Great info, thanks for sharing
Hi,
I love your calendar however I am modifying it for use in displaying employee performance metrics on a day by day basis.
I see where tblChosen and tblDates are named ranges however I cannot find them anywhere.
Are they assigned to specific cells because I cannot tell.
I see both of them in the Name Manager, which tells me what they refer to but does not give a value or cell location.
@Mike
With the Names in the Name Manager
Simply select the name
Then click in the Refers To: box at the Bottom
Excel will take you to where the Named Range is referring to
[…] Wow – what do you think of the interactive calendar chart demo above? To achieve this impressive effect you must have Excel 2010 because it utilises slicers, which is a feature introduced in Excel 2010. Find out how this treasure was created on Chandoo’s page. […]
Hi, Chandoo
This Pivot Calendar is an excellent idea. I’ve done one for myself using your guidelines. I just need something I’m not being able to do. I need that when I open the file the default date is set to today’s date. I know how to do it with conditional formatting. But I think I’ll need some vba coding for this. Can you please help me with this. Thanks in advance