Today lets take a stroll outside what Excel can do and make something fancy, fun and may be useful.
Nowadays, many newspapers, websites and magazines are featuring info-graphics. An info-graphic is a collection of shiny, colorful & data-full charts (or often pieces of text.) In many of these info-graphics, you can see threaded-donut charts. Not sure what that is..? It is not same as the blasphemy of spoiling a soft, sweet, supple donut with a piece of string. No one should be excused for an offense like that.
What I am talking about is this:
How to create this chart?
A word of caution
Before you smack your lips at the thought of stringy donuts, let me warn you.
- Go easy with these charts. Use them sparingly. As a rule a thermo-meter chart would be better (easy to make, takes less space, scalable) for situations like this.
Now that we have learned the ill-effects of donuts, let’s make & eat one, cause we are bad-ass like that.
Set up data cells
This is easy. We will use C4 to capture the input for donut size.
In C5, write =1-C4
This will give us the balance portion of donut where thread should appear.
Create a donut chart
Select both cells and insert a donut chart.
This is what we get. Just the donut, no strings attached 🙂
Make 2nd slice of donut transparent
This is simple.
- Select the 2nd slice of donut (click on it once, click again)
- Fill it with no color, set no line.
- Your donut is transparent.
Adding thread to donut – 2 ways to do it
There are many ways to cook a donut.
Method 1: Placing a circle shape behind the donut chart
Select plot area of the donut chart and make it transparent.- Draw a circle shape (Insert ribbon > Shapes > Circle)
- Fill with no color, make the outline thick enough
- Align centers of chart & circle (select both, use Format ribbon > Align and then Align middle, Align center)
- Push the circle behind the chart using “Send to back” from Format ribbon.
- For extra safety, group the chart and circle together. This way they will stay together.
Method 2: Use circle as background image for plot area
This is my favorite.
- Draw a circle shape somewhere on your worksheet.
- Fill it with no color and make the outline thick enough.
- Copy the circle shape (Select it, press CTRL+C)
- Select Donut chart’s plot area
- Press CTRL+1 to format it (alternatively right-click > format plot area)
- Follow the steps in image aside.
Download Threaded Donut Chart
I wish we can download donuts, but that day is not here.
Click here to download the donut chart workbook. Examine chart settings to understand this technique better.
Should you use this chart?
We all know that donuts and pies alone cannot make a healthy diet. But once in a while, a donut adds variety. Same goes for charts too.
Go with tried and tested charts like,
- Bars & columns
- Line charts
- Conditional formatting icons
- Sparklines
- Scatter plot
- May be an area chart or two
They are easy to set up, easy to understand, scalable, fit in to any sized report and awesome.
That said, I would certainly experiment with stringy donuts in my future reports to see how they fit. A good example is to use this to depict % completion of a project or goal. Looks slick, easy to read and not too difficult to create.
What other charts work in this situation?
If you have a situation to show x out y is done, then consider these other charts too:
- Thermometer chart
- Bullet chart
- Budget vs. Actual chart (14 variants)
- Conditional formatting rating icons
- Best charts to compare actual with target values
What do you think?
When it comes to donuts, people have strong opinions. What about you? Do you like the stringy donut chart? Are you planning to use it any of your upcoming reports or dashboards? Please tell us using comments.
13 Responses to “Using pivot tables to find out non performing customers”
To avoid the helper column and the macro, I would transpose the data into the format shown above (Name, Year, Sales). Now I can show more than one year, I can summarize - I can do many more things with it. ASAP Utilities (http://www.asap-utilities.com) has a new experimental feature that can easily transpose the table into the correct format. Much easier in my opinion.
David
Of course with alternative data structure, we can easily setup a slicer based solution so that everything works like clockwork with even less work.
David, I was just about to post the same!
In Contextures site, I remember there's a post on how to do that. Clearly, the way data is layed out on the very beginning is critical to get the best results, and even you may thinkg the original layout is the best way, it is clearly not. And that kind of mistakes are the ones I love ! because it teaches and trains you to avoid them, and how to think on the data structure the next time.
Eventually, you get to that place when you "see" the structure on the moment the client tells you the request, and then, you realized you had an ephiphany, that glorious moment when data is no longer a mistery to you!!!
Rgds,
Chandoo,
If the goal is to see the list of customers who have not business from yearX, I would change the helper column formula to :
=IF(selYear="all",sum(C4:M4),sum(offset(C4:M4,,selyear-2002,1,columns(C4:M4)-selyear+2002)))This formula will sum the sales from Selected Year to 2012.
JMarc
If you are already using a helper column and the combox box runs a macro after it changes, why not just adjust the macro and filter the source data?
Regards
I gotta say, it seems like you are giving 10 answers to 10 questions when your client REALLY wants to know is: "What is the last year "this" customer row had a non-zero Sales QTY?... You're missing the forest for the trees...
Change the helper column to:
=IFERROR(INDEX(tblSales[[#Headers],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],0,MATCH(9.99999999999999E+307,tblSales[[#This Row],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],1)),"NO SALES")
And yes, since I'm matching off of them for value, I would change the headers to straight "2002" instead of "Sales 2002" but you sort the table on the helper column and then and there you can answer all of your questions.
Hi thanks for this. Just can't figure out how you get the combo box to control the pivot table. Can you please advise?
Cheers
@Kevin.. You are welcome. To insert a combo box, go to Developer ribbon > Insert > form controls > combo box.
For more on various form controls and how to use them, please read this: http://chandoo.org/wp/2011/03/30/form-controls/
Thanks Chandoo. But I know how to insert a combobox, I was more referring to how does in control the year in the pivot table? Or is this obvious? I note that if I select the Selected Year from the PivotTable Field List it says "the field has no itens" whereas this would normally allow you to change the year??
Thanks again
worked it out thanks...
when =data!Q2 changes it changes the value in column N:N and then when you do a refreshall the pivottable vlaues get updated
Still not sure why PivotTable Field List says “the field has no itens"?? I created my own pivot table and could not repeat that.
Hi, I put the sales data in range(F5:P19) and added a column D with the title 'Last sales in year'. After that, in column D for each customer, the simple formula
=2000+MATCH(1000000,E5:P5)
will provide the last year in which that particular customer had any sales, which can than easily be managed by autofilter.
Somewhat longer but perhaps a bit more solid (with the column titles in row 4):
=RIGHT(INDEX($F$4:$P$19,1,MATCH(1000000,F5:P5)),4)
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