Excel Charts, Graphs and Templates

This is the final part of our series on how to analyze half a million customer complaints. Click below links to read part 1 & 2.

1. Complaint reason analysis – Part 1
2. Regional trends & analysis – Part 2

Customer satisfaction scorecard

In the previous parts of this case study, we understood what kind of complaints were made and where they came from (states). For the customer satisfaction scorecard, let’s focus on individual companies.

This is part two of our three part series on how to analyze half a million customer complaints. Read part 1 here.

Analyzing Regional Trends

As introduced in part 1, our complaints dataset has geographical information too. We know the state & zip code for each complaint. Please note that zip codes are partial or missing for a 10% of the data.

In this article, let’s explore three ways to analyze regional trends.

1. Regional trends by state, product & issue
2. Complaints per million by state
3. Complaints by zip code

How would you analyze data when you have lots of it? That is the inspiration for this series.

Let’s meet our data – Finance Industry Consumer Complaints

As part of open data initiatives, US government & Consumer Financial Protection Bureau maintain a list of all consumer complaints made against financial institutions (banks, credit unions etc.) You can download this data from the catalog page here. I have obtained the data on 1st of February, 2016. The download has 513,824 records. Each row contains one complaint.

In this and next two parts of the series, we are going to analyze these half a million complaints to find insights.

Here is a quick tip to reduce the time you spend on chart formatting – use chart styles & color themes.

Excel offers various pre-defined color schemes and chart styles. Using them is very simple.

1. Select your chart
2. Go to Chart Design ribbon
3. Click on the style or color scheme you want.
4. Your chart changes instantly.

Here is an interesting chart from Economist, ironically titled The weight of the world. Can you tell what is wrong with it?

Yesterday I saw a tweet from @JanWillemTulp with random snow flake generator.

That got me thinking…? Why can’t we make a snow flake pattern in Excel?

This is what I came up with.

Read on to know more about this snow flake and download the example workbook.

Let’s learn how to create a color changing line chart using Excel. This is what we will create.

Looks interesting? Read on.

Hello all, prepare to be amazed! Here are 43 creative, fun & informative ways to visualize KPI data.

About a month ago, I asked you to visualize KPI data. We received 65 entries for this contest. After carefully reviewing the entries, our panel of judges have discarded 22 of them due to poor charting choices, errors or just plain data dumps. We are left with 43 amazing entries, each creatively analyzed the data and presented results in a powerful way.

How to read this post?

This is a fairly large post. If you are reading this in email or news-reader, it may not look properly. Click here to read it on chandoo.org.

1. Each entry is shown in a box with the contestant’s name on top. Entries are shown in alphabetical order of contestant’s name.
2. You can see a snapshot of the entry and more thumbnails below.
3. The thumb-nails are click-able, so that you can enlarge and see the details.
4. You can download the contest entry workbook, see & play with the files.
5. You can read my comments at the bottom.
6. At the bottom of this post, you can find a list of key charting & dashboard design techniques. Go thru them to learn how to create similar reports at work.

Thank you

Thank you very much for all the participants in this contest. I have thoroughly enjoyed exploring your work & learned a lot from them. I am sure you had fun creating these too.

So go ahead and enjoy the entries.

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In the 49th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s talk about data dumps!

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

• What is a data dump
• Examples of data dump
• Why we dump
• Ways to avoid data dumps
  • Go for information dumps
  • Sort the dump
  • Filter the dump
  • Give a table
• Resources for you

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In the 48th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s make some animated charts!!!

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

• Announcements
• Why animate your charts?
• Non-VBA methods to animate charts
  • Excel 2013’s built-in animation effects
  • Iterative formula approach
• VBA based animation
  • Cartoon film analogy
  • Understanding the VBA part
• Example animated chart – Sales of a new product
• Resources and downloads for you

Today is Diwali, the festival of lights. I wish you and your family a happy, bright and prosperous festive time. May your house shower with lots of light, laughter and love.

Diwali is one of my favorite festivals. It is a time when all family members get together, eat delicious food, laugh to hearts content and light up diyas (small oil lamps) to celebrate the victory of good over evil. This year, my kids (who are 6 yrs btw) are very excited about the festival. They are looking forward to lighting up diyas and crackers (fire works).

To celebrate the holiday, I made something for you.

An animated flower pot firework in Excel.

Imagine you are the head of training department at ACME Inc. You arrange training programs round the year to empower your team. It is hard work, coordinating between employees, trainers, department heads, venues and coffee machines. What if there is something to help you keep track of all this? I am not talking about getting you a shiny new iPad, you silly. I am talking about a tracker & calendar built in Excel that ties everything together (well, almost everything, you still have to fill the coffee machine.)

We are going to build a training program tracker & calendar using Excel.

Here is a quick visualization challenge for you.

There are 25 KPIs and each has a base value, current month, corresponding month values. The KPIs also have targets.

The data looks like this:

Download the data:

Click here to download the data for this contest.

Rules for this contest:

• Visualize this data using one Excel chart (one chart per KPI is ok too).
• You may omit any any data
• You can use interactive charts.
• Do not use add-ins or VBA to make your charts

Go ahead and make your chart(s).

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In the 46th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s talk about gantt charts and project plans.

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

• A brief intro to Excel 2016
• What is a Gantt chart?
• How Gantt charts can help us?
• How to create Gantt charts in Excel
  • Using bar charts with invisible series
  • Using conditional formatting and formulas
  • Using ready-made templates
• Resources on Gantt charts & project planning
• Conclusions

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. Read on…

Let’s say you made a chart to show actual and forecast values. By default, both values look in same color. But we would like to separate forecast values by showing them in another color.

If you are a seasoned Excel user, you may be thinking, “Oh, that’s easy. I will just create 2 sets of data (one for actual and one for forecast), make a chart from them and apply separate colors.”

But here is a really simple way to get the same effect.

Use a semi-transparent box to mask the forecast values, as shown above. Read on to learn how to do this.

We know that column charts are excellent for presenting information. But what if some of the columns are too tall and hijacking the rest. In a previous article, we discussed few of the approaches. Today let’s learn how to build a cropped chart (broken y-axis chart) using Excel, something like above.

Looks interesting? Read on.

I have an exciting announcement to share with you. My first ever print book – Dashboards for Excel, co-authored with Jordan Goldmeier is releasing on 15th September.

Dashboards for Excel – what is it?

As the name suggests this book is a handy guide for anyone preparing dashboards, management reports and business intelligence workbooks using Excel. The key benefits are,

• Learn the visualization tools, charts, tables, and graphs important to management.
• Understand what management doesn’t want to see in a report
• Turn around dashboards faster and cheaper than ever before
• Understand the key role dashboards play in an organization
• Analyze real-world dashboards to apply important features to your own organization
• Utilize understated, but powerful, Excel formulas and VBA code
• Avoid common pitfalls in Excel development and dashboard creation
• Get started with the Excel data model, PowerPivot, and Power Query

As you can see, this is an advanced Excel book with lots of examples, case studies and practical tips.

Funnel charts are useful to visualize sales & marketing performance. In this brief video, let’s understand how to make a quick funnel chart in Excel.

Read on to learn how to make funnel charts & to download a template for your funnel analysis needs.

Here is a best practice to improve your dashboard usability. If you have an interactive dashboard, highlight user selections thru conditional formatting.

Check out below quick video to understand what this means.