We all know that area charts are great for understanding how a list of values have changed over time. Today, let’s learn how to create an area chart that shows different colors for upward & downward movements.
The inspiration for this came from a recent chart published in Wall Street Journal about Chinese stock markets (shown below).
We will try to create a similar chart using Excel.
This is what we are going to come up with.
Looks interesting? Read on…
Creating an area chart with different colors for up & down slopes
Step 1. Gather the data
For our example, let’s use Indian stock market data for last 10 years. Specifically, BSE Sensex weekly closing prices between 1-July-2005 and 27-July-2015.
There are 3 columns in this data – Date, Closing price & Volume, as shown below. Let’s say all of this data is in a tabled named data that starts at cell B6.
Step 2. Find out when to switch colors
The next step is to find out when to switch colors.
We can add 3 additional columns to our data to spot the switches, and split data to Advances & Declines accordingly.
Here is what we get.
Detecting when a switch occurs:
When looking at closing price for a day, we need to know if the line direction has changed or not. To detect this, we can use a formula like this:
Assuming the closing price we are looking at is in cell C7,
=C7<>MEDIAN(C6:C8) will tell us if the value in C7 is switching the trend or not.
Why does this formula work? Think again. For more on this technique, refer to BETWEEN Formula in Excel.
Step 3. Expanding the data so that we can create an area chart
If we create an area chart with just the data from above step (only advances & declines columns), we end up with a chart that looks like this.
As you can see, the green & red areas (advancing & declining data) have tiny white space between them.
This is because, when we switch from green to red, the green series goes from peak to 0 and simultaneously, red series goes from 0 to peak, creating an effect like below (chart made from sub-set of data)
To create correct shading effect, we need to expand the data so that on dates when switching happens, there is a duplicate row.
See below illustration to understand what we need.
Writing formulas to expand data
We can use simple arithmetic along with healthy dose of INDEX formulas to create expanded data set. Can you figure out the formulas yourself as homework?
Please examine the downloadable workbook to understand these formulas more.
After expanding the data, the same area chart looks like this:
Step 4. Create area chart from expanded dataset
Select the expanded advances & declines columns and create an area chart from them. Make sure horizontal axis labels are pointing to the expanded date column we constructed in step 3.
Your chart is ready now.
We can add few more bells and whistles to it and come up with below output.
- The volume chart at the bottom is a sparkline
- We can find longest bull & bear rallies using longest winning streak formula
Download Area Chart with different colors for up & down slopes workbook
Please click here to download area chart with different colors workbook. Play with the chart & formulas to learn more.
How do you like area chart with different shades?
I think this is a powerful technique to quickly eye-ball data and see where directional changes are occurring, what patterns (if any) are they following etc.
If you observe carefully, our Excel version and WSJ’s charts differ in one key aspect. In WSJ chart, they are shading bull & bear markets where overall trend is upwards or downwards with minor changes during the market period. What formula / approach changes do you think are necessary to make exact replica of WSJ chart in Excel?
Also, do share your feedback about this chart and how you are planning to reuse the concepts at your work.
Addendum – Moving average based smoothing of trends
We can use simple moving averages to smooth the trends so that we can spot upward / downward movements better.
Here is an example chart.
You may download this workbook to examine the formulas & chart.
Charts to show change over time
Understanding change is a key component of any analysis. Check out below charting techniques & tutorials to learn few more valuable skills.
- Narrating the story of change – Case study on how fast America changes its mind
- Advances vs. Declines chart
- How tax burden has changed over years – interactive Excel chart
- Use indexed charts when analyzing change over time
- Never show simple numbers in your dashboards
- Comparing with benchmarks – shading under / over achievement
23 Responses to “Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA”
Its possible to display up to 4 text values.
Have a look at the screen shot of an example that I had posted way back at the EHA and figure out how its done !
http://tinypic.com/r/muzywk/6
With Excel 2010 you can use Conditional Formatting to apply custom number formats which can display text. (In older versions you can only modify text color and cell background color, but not number formats.) Using CF allows for an even larger number of different display values.
[...] Display text values in Pivot Tables without VBA [...]
Hey,
Thanks, this helps. But how do you do it for multiple values where there is a huge amount of non repeating text?
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn't a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn’t a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
[...] Pivot Tables take tables of data and allow the user to summarise and consolidate the data at the same time. This is a great and very fast method of analysis but is restricted to handling mathematical functions on the value field resulting in numerical summaries. – read more [...]
[…] Read more here: Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA […]
There is a very good way actually for handling text inside values area.
First you create a special column on the very left side and call it ID, and put unique ID (numbers only), and then create a pivot table with:
Row Labels and Column labels as you like, and in the Values labels use the unique ID number.
Move the unique ID number (copy paste) somewhere to the right and use vlookup to load the data you need using the ID as reference.
It is a bit longer way but for me it works perfectly to combine values as you like in any moment.
hope helps.
Regards,
Jon
Thank you! I finally understand pivot tables thanks to your clear, concise explanations and examples.
Good Day. This is exactly what i have been looking for. However when i try it on my pivot table or even when i try to recreate this exercise using the sample worksheet, i get this error:
"Microsoft Excel cannot use the number format you typed. Try using one of the built-in number formats."
Same thing here, Excel quite did not like the format in my PowerPivot. Any clues as to what may be going on? Thanks.
I have the same thing happening on my end. I'm running a normal pivot table on a .xlsm file.
@Danzi
What format did you use?
can you post the file ?
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C
MR.A CFVDE2458T
MR.Z AAVCR12548C
MR.X AAAAC1254T
MR.Z AADCD245T
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C 1000
MR.A CFVDE2458T 2000
MR.Z AAVCR12548C 5451
MR.X AAAAC1254T 45564
MR.Z AADCD245T 4500
how to get pivot tabe so i get PAN no. against Name.
I found an easy way to get text values in pivot table.
I create an other worksheet in wich each cell has a formula that copy the pivot table. The trick is that the formula does a lookup for the numbers in the pivot table.
The formula looks like that:
=IF(ISNUMBER(table!A1);VLOOKUP(table!A1;Code!$A$1:$B$65;2);IF(ISBLANK(table!A1);" ";table!A1))
Code is a worksheet where there is a liste of text /numbers correspondance.
As a bonus The new sheet is easier to format
Additional trick:
In my case, i encoded differents codeid with a power(2, codeId-1) so that summing then is equivalent to concatenate them.
1-A
2-B
4-C
8-D
yields :
5 - AC
14 - BCD
Hi
I want to ask if pivot can display dates in pivot field. As in a column i have customers and in row different items i want to know there last purchase date. anyone help in this??
Hello Guys, Need your help
I am doing some analysis of the cycle time of the product i.e how much time a product takes from manufacturing to the central warehouse.
I have batch numbers for the product and against them i have to pull out the diff. dates
Like the base date is from where the manufacturing start. So i have the batch number,against it's manuf. date. Now i have to pull out the date when it was quality released.
I have the quality released data but the data have duplicates, like i will have two dates or may be three for the same batch. So my main objective is to pull out the date which is latest among them.
BATCH NO. DATE of Mfg. DATE of Quality release
A1 12/4/2014 (HERE I HAVE TO PULL value)
Next Sheet
BATCH NO. DATE of Quality Release
A1 14/5/2014
a2 23/5/2016
A1 12/5/2014
A1 13/6/2014
From this sheet i have to pull up the latest date format of date here is dd/mm/yyy
TIA
[…] needed to present text instead of counts in a pivot table value column. Here is an excellent resource for Excel manipulation, in addition to an overview of pivot […]
This is great thank you.
Wow!!! Excellent!! It helped me a lot.
I am developing training tracking sheet for 200 employees with training completed date. Each employee will be attending 25 courses. How to indicate actual dates in pivot table value field.