All articles in 'Charts and Graphs' Category

Often you may have a set of data and need to know what an intermediate or future value of that data may be.
This week we will investigate 3 methods of tackling this problem using Excel.
In this post we’ll look at manual forecasting.

I have an exciting news & massive post for you.

Chandoo.org reaches 20,156 RSS Subscriber mark on Jan 19, 2011As of Jan 19, 2011, our little blog has registered our 20,000th RSS Subscriber. While this is not a huge achievement or anything, It certainly calls for celebration. I am so happy to see our mission to make people awesome in Excel is reaching out to more people everyday. Thank you.

To celebrate this milestone, I am doing a massive post with 220 Excel tips, tricks, tutorials & templates.

Formulas [52 tips]
Formatting & Conditional Formatting [36 tips]
Charting [60 tips]
Tables & Pivot Tables [15 tips]
Using Excel [47 tips]
Free Downloads [5 tips]
Recommended Resources [5 tips]

Some of you know our guest author and Excel ninja Hui. Yesterday was his birthday. And I wanted to create nice birthday gift for him. So I took a database dump of our forums data and created a dashboard.

Read rest of this post to see the dashboard & download workbook.

Here is a charting challenge to begin your Christmas week. Recently Guardian’s Data Blog released World Education Rankings data and a sample visualization. Now your challenge is to make your chart visualizing World Education Rankings data.

You can see the chart I have constructed above. Read the rest of the post to find out how I made this chart and download the workbook.

Post your submissions using comments.

(You can win my latest Excel Dashboard Training kit free, read this post to find out how.)

Over at Jorge’s ExcelCharts blog, he started a very good discussion on Excel Dashboards: Who needs them anyway?.

Jorge has very good experience designing, working on and teaching about dashboards. So he uses all that skill to gaze in to a crystal ball, to understand who needs excel dashboards and why. In this post, I build on his argument and ask you the big question – “If you make or use Excel Dashboards, who are you?”

Do you know that Excel 2010 makes creation of dynamic dashboards very simple?

Yes, that is right. Using slicers feature, you can create dynamic excel dashboards from your data in very little time. Today we are going to learn a technique that will help you create a dashboard like below.

Read rest of this post to find out how to construct a dynamic dashboard in Excel & download the example workbook.

A good dashboard must show important information at a glance and provide option to drill down for details.

Showing Top 10 (or bottom 10) lists in a dashboard is a good way to achieve this (see aside). Today we will learn an interesting technique to do this in Excel.

Today we will learn an interesting animation technique that ONLY uses, … wait for it …, Excel Formulas. That is right, we will use simple formulas to animate values in Excel.

Intrigued? Confused? Interested?

First see a short demo of excel animation achieved using this technique.

Now read the rest of this post to learn more about this technique and download sample workbook.

First some good news, On 21st November, 2010, our little blog received its 10,000th comment!

Thank you so much for making this happen.

Those of you reading chandoo.org for a while know my penchant for comments. I have learned a lot of excel tips & ideas just by reading the comments you posted on this blog. I think comments are one of the best parts of this blog. So, naturally, I wanted to celebrate this milestone, with something big & awesome.

My intention was to download all the 10,000+ comments and play with the data to come up with something outstanding, like a dashboard. It took me 2 days to conceptualize and create this beauty.

We make charts with date axis all the time. So, today we will learn how to set up axis settings in Excel so that Months & Years are shown neatly structured without cluttering your chart. See the example next to understand.

Two weeks back I ran a poll asking you to tell me what is the last visible cell in your excel window. It was a casual poll. So I didn’t expect a lot of responses. But, boy I was wrong! 295 of you have responded at last count. This is so much more than what I expected.

As I said, the purpose of this poll is to make a visualization out of the poll responses. In this post you can see the chart(s) I made from this data & learn more.

Introducing a method of allowing data points to be interactively highlighted in Excel Scatter / X-Y Charts and Line Charts.
You will see a lot of these style charts in various places where you want to highlight various aspects of the chart to your audience. It is a great technique for complex scientific and engineering charts where you may have hundreds or thousands of points.

Once you start using Excel to develop systems, budget, forecast and large tables of data you may come across the dilemma of “How do I know this is right” or “How do I truth check this”.
This post will add a tool to your arsenal to help you out.

Analyzing competition is one of the key aspects of running a business. In this article, learn how to use Excel’s scatter plots to understand competition, like shown aside.

The inspiration for this comes from a recent article on Asymco analyzing mobile handset market (Apple iPhone, Nokia etc.) and how it has changed since 2007.

Read the rest of the post to learn how to create this type of chart in excel. Also, you can download the chart template. Go ahead.

As some of you know, I run an online Excel Training Program called as Excel School. I have opened registrations for 3rd batch of this program on September 14th. Thank you very much for supporting this program wildly. In a few hours, I will be closing the registrations for Excel School.

Click here to sign up for Excel School

Read the rest of the post to learn more about Excel School and also download time across world chart template.