Econimist’s daily chart is a one of my daily data porn stops. They take interesting data sets and visualize in compelling ways. While the daily chart page is insightful, sometimes they make poor charting choices. For example, this recent chart visualizing how countries spend their money uses a variation of notorious bubble chart. Click on the chart to enlarge.
What is wrong with this chart?
Bubble charts force us to measure and compare areas of circles. Unless you have a measuring tape somehow embedded in your eyes and you are a walking human scientific calculator, you would find this task impossible.
So when you look at the chart and want to find out what percentage Japanese spend on restaurants or how much Americans pay for housing, your guesses will have large error margins.
Not only bubble charts are difficult to read, they are very hard to align. So when you have a bunch of bubbles, no matter how hard you try, your chart looks clumsy (see how the Russian food bubble eats in to Mexico’s bubble, as if it is too hungry 😉 )
Let’s check out a few alternatives to this chart
The simplest alternative for all the bubble madness? Use bar charts!
Bar charts are easy – you can make them in no-time, your audience can read them in no-time. 2X time saved. What not to like 🙂
Alternative 0 – Straight replacement of bubbles with bars:
This one is simple. We take the data, apply conditional formatting > data bars on top of it. We can add an additional rule to show only MIN & MAX values in each row and hide the rest of the values with a custom formatting code – ;;;
This is what you get:
The above chart is way better than bubbles. If you want to shift the focus from country to expense category, you can transform the same chart.
Related resources:
Alternative 1 – Transformed bar chart
Again, same techniques, applied on transformed data set.
Alternative 2 – Highlighting above & below average values in different colors
While conditional formatting data bars are fun and simple, they can only show up in one color. So if you want a few bars to be in different color based on a condition (for ex: all values less than average in different color), you need to venture beyond the data bars.
We can use 2 techniques:
- Create in-cell bar charts, using REPT formula and color the bars with conditional formatting
- Create a regular bar chart with two series of data – above & below average and color them differently
REPT formula approach is fun and easy. Using that, we get this:
Related resources:
Alternative 3 – Adding labels to MIN & MAX values too
Once we have the REPT() based chart, we can add extra columns to conditionally show the data labels too.
This is what we get:
Download ‘how they spend’ chart alternatives
Click here to download the Excel workbook containing all these charts. Examine the formulas & conditional formats to learn more.
More charting stories & case-studies
Check out below examples to learn few more powerful ways to tell stories using charts. 
- Changing stubborn opinions with visualizations
- Narrating the story of change – Excel charting case study
- Evolution of Facebook privacy policies – Excel Panel Chart
- Visualizaing survey results – incell panel chart
How would you visualize this data?
What do you feel about the bubble chart? If you think it is a poor choice, how would you visualize this data? Please share your thoughts and implementations in the comment section.
23 Responses to “Learn Top 10 Excel Features”
What it looks like if excel without formula?? 🙂
It would be not excel it would just be fancy tables in which you could just use power point. (Chandoo) would Access be an alternative?
Awesome piece of work!!!
Great article.
Chandoo - my biggest interest in the article was the awesome word-graphic at the top - where did you go to get it done into a shape?
@Rich.. thank you. I used http://www.tagxedo.com/ to generate this word cloud. I took all the comments in the original post, pasted them in tagxedo website and set up the shape etc.
Awesome Chandoo.. You need always needs coffee to start up with. BTW , how did u created the Heart Shaped picture filled with High Repetitive text in it .. Please put it on your Next blog ...
Chandoo, good article. I’ve added a link to it from Connexion – our collection of the most useful and interesting spreadsheet-related articles from the web. See http://www.i-nth.com/resources/connexion
Hi,
Just one small question. Where the hell have been I in the past for not discovering this website sooner?
I've lost a job interview recently where even though I had the subject knowledge, I was not upto their mark in Excel.
Thank you for all the free tips, guidance and for creating this forum environment.
[PS: I've just been through the site for the 1st time, and have signed up for the newsletter. You can expect pretty stupid questions from me soon]
Hy Chandoo, you always inspire me with to explore something new in excel. This data structure table is only for excel 2007 or compatible to 2010. I recently installed latest excel version 2013 in my System and experience problems regarding operating according to previous one. I'm waiting your article relates to that excel version.
Thanks
Awesome article Mr. Chandoo and that is a awesome heart shaped pic you created. Great tips as well.
[...] Learn Top 10 Excel Features | Chandoo.org – Learn Microsoft Excel Online. [...]
Chandoo is awesome..
Thanks, i got better, And i always get 90.50 in my grade card but now i get 96.50 i improved because of the tutorials you gave, Thank You Very Much Chandoo Guy.
Hi chandoo, i am intersted in seeing the video or step by step done procedure of analysing the comments and presenting in the data percentage steps. I think this one would be first step in finding out how generally happens data calculation. Thank you.
As well i would like to know how to get that black shape art of your face which i see in chandoo. I am interested in making it for me.
Nice to see the features considered by Excel users to be most useful. It might be a good idea to also analyze StackOverflow Excel questions to see what keywords appear most often.
Here are my top 10 Excel Features (for advanced users):
http://www.analystcave.com/excel-10-top-excel-features/
Thanks a ton for this it totally helped with my homework ????
Very good effort
Thank you for this. Lots of learning in the links you've provided for this septuagenarian.
Pls send me new post
Dude, your humor ? ?
Loved your work.
Hello Sir,
I am Sanjeev Khakre and i from Indore City, India , I am your big follower and i have watch your videos and learnt a lots of excel trick or function and many more . thanks so much for all of your excellent support.
Your excel knowledge is real awesome.
Thanks
Sanjeev
Your work is excellent but pls willing to know more details about the features of microsoft excel
Chandoo Would Access be a better alternative than VB?