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All articles with 'Advanced Charting' Tag

How to make stream graphs in Excel?

Published on Jul 16, 2020 in Charts and Graphs
How to make stream graphs in Excel?

A stream graph or stream plot is an area chart that looks like a stream. In this post, let me show you how to create an interactive stream graph using Excel area charts. The original design for this graph is inspired from Cedric Scherer.

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How to make an Interactive Chart Slider Thingy

How to make an Interactive Chart Slider Thingy

Ok, I will be honest. I have no idea what to call it. May be Chart Cover Flow? But Interactive Chart Slider Thingy sounds so better. So let’s go with it.

Learn how to create this magical contraption in Excel.

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Celebrate with spider web chart [Halloween Fun]

Published on Oct 31, 2019 in Charts and Graphs
Celebrate with spider web chart [Halloween Fun]

It’s Halloween time. As adults, we can’t go trick or treating. We can of course dress up in costumes and entertain others. But what about the poor spreadsheets. Don’t they deserve some of this fun too?

Hell yeah! So I made a spider web generator in Excel. Just use it to make a spooky cob web pattern and add it to your report / dashboard / time sheet or whatever else. Surprise your colleagues.

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Impress with Tornado Charts in Excel

Published on Oct 7, 2019 in Charts and Graphs, Pivot Tables & Charts
Impress with Tornado Charts in Excel

It’s tornado season. Don’t freak out, I am talking about Excel tornado charts. Use them to visualize age and gender-wise KPIs. Here is a quick demo of interactive tornado chart made in Excel. Watch it and read on to learn how to make your own tornado in a spreadsheet.

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Tour de France – Distance & Pace over time – Radial Charts

Tour de France – Distance & Pace over time – Radial Charts

This is an Excel replica of excellent Tableau visual on Tour de France winner data made by Marc Reid.

Last week I saw a stunning visualization on Tour de France using radial charts. I wanted to replicate it in Excel. So here we go.

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How to fake “Key influencers chart” in Excel?

Published on May 1, 2019 in Charts and Graphs
How to fake “Key influencers  chart” in Excel?

Recently, Microsoft Power BI introduced a very useful visualization, called key influencers visualization. As the name suggests, this is a chart of key parameters that effect a measure or outcome.

For example, you have customer satisfaction rating as a measure. Now you want to know which aspects of your data impact the ratings most? You can create the key influencer visual and Power BI finds all the top ranking influencers (using rules and machine learning).

But can we make it in Excel?

Let’s see…

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Beautiful Budget vs. Actual chart to make your boss love you

Published on May 16, 2018 in Charts and Graphs
Beautiful Budget vs. Actual chart to make your boss love you

Call them by any name – Budget vs. Actual, Target vs. Actual, Goal vs. Progress, KPIs, Performance charts, but they are the bread and butter of business charting. So how about a drop dead gorgeous and insightful chart for your next meeting with the folks upstairs? Something like above.

Read on to learn how to create this chart in Excel.

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60 sports in six charts

Published on May 14, 2018 in Charts and Graphs
60 sports in six charts

On twitter I follow many charting and visualization related accounts. One of them is @Andy Kriebel, who runs Makeover Monday. The idea is simple. Every Monday they publish a data-set and ask the community to visualize. Last Monday (7th May, 2018), they have published about toughest sport by skill data. This categorizes 60 sports by 10 skill categories to find out which sport is the toughest. Over the weekend, Andy posted a summary of all toughest sport viz entries. Many of the entries are made in Tableau. I thought it would be a fun challenge to re-create some of these charts in Excel. The result is this post. 60 sports in 6 charts. Check out the charts and download workbook to learn more.

First four charts are re-creations of Tableau designs. Last two are mine.

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Awesome chart to visualize Salary Increases for 3,500+ people [Tutorial]

Published on Aug 17, 2017 in Charts and Graphs, R programming
Awesome chart to visualize Salary Increases for 3,500+ people [Tutorial]

Game for some charting awesomeness?

Off late, I have been doing a lot of data analysis and visualization on performance ratings, salary hike, gender pay equality etc. Today let me share you an awesome way to visualize massive amounts of data.

Scenario: Your organization of 3,686 people recently went thru annual performance ratings & review process. At the end of it, everyone was offered some salary increase (from $0 to $24,000 per year). You have 7 business groups. How do you tell the story of all these salary hikes in one chart?

How about the one above?

Ready to know how to create this in Excel? Read on.

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Joyplot in Excel

Joyplot in Excel

Over on Twitter, I came across this beautiful chart, aptly titled – Joyplot. It is the kind of chart that makes you all curious and awed. So I did what any Excel nerd would do. Recreated it in Excel of course. This post takes you thru the process.

Take a look at final outcome above. Read on to learn more.

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Interactive Decision Tree Visualization in Excel [Trump vs. Hillary in Swing States]

Published on Oct 11, 2016 in Charts and Graphs, Pivot Tables & Charts, VBA Macros
Interactive Decision Tree Visualization in Excel [Trump vs. Hillary in Swing States]

It is election time in USA, and that means there is a whole lot of drama, discussions and of course data analysis. There are tons of cool visualizations published on all the data. Previously, we talked about “How Trump happened” chart.

Today let’s take a look at the beautiful decision tree chart by NY Times explaining what would happen if each of the 10 swing states vote for Democrats or Republicans. Go ahead and look at that chart. And when you are done playing with it, come back.

My first thought after looking at the chart is: Wow, that is cool. I wonder how we can recreate that experience in Excel?

But as you can guess, making a dynamic tree visualization in Excel is pretty hard. You can create a bubble chart mixed with XY chart to show all the nodes of the decision tree, but as this tree has 2^10 nodes at the bottom level (and 2^11-1 total nodes) our chart would look very clumsy and busy.

So, instead of replicating NY Times chart, why not make our own version that explains the data? You can reuse this idea when visualizing outcomes of several what-if scenarios.

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Mapping Spread of Obesity [Chart Critique and Alternatives]

Mapping Spread of Obesity [Chart Critique and Alternatives]

Over at Flowing Data, Nathan has published an interesting visualization about spread of obesity.

While the above chart is quite interesting, it doesn’t offer much insight in to the data. There are a few drawbacks,

  • Understanding obesity trends for a given state over the years is hard due to the layout and format of the chart.
  • Finding which states are experiencing most obesity growth rates is not possible
  • Ironically, the chart itself is obese. It takes too much space to explain the data.

Nevertheless, the chart looks cool and can be reused with smaller data-sets (quarterly trends or just for a few years). So let’s recreate the same in Excel. While we are at it, let’s also build an alternative visualization to explore the obesity data.

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Visualizing target vs. actual progress – Biker on a hill chart

Visualizing target vs. actual progress – Biker on a hill chart

Over the years, we have discussed a whole heap of techniques to visualize budget vs. actual charts. Today let’s take a ride on this slope again and learn another fun, silly & awesome way to depict target vs. actual progress.

Introducing biker on a hill chart

Tada!!!

Biker on a hill!?! Don’t worry, I didn’t fall down on a descent and lose my brain. I am talking about an Excel chart to visualize target vs. actual progress on a time line with biker on a hill analogy. See the above chart, you will know.

Looks interesting? Read on to learn how to create this in Excel.

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Stacked Bar/Column Chart with Indicator Arrows – Advanced

Published on Sep 15, 2016 in Charts and Graphs, Excel Howtos, Huis, Posts by Hui
Stacked Bar/Column Chart with Indicator Arrows – Advanced

Lets take last weeks Stacked Bar/Column Chart and add some high-performance steroids.

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Stacked Bar and Indicator Arrow Chart – Tutorial

Published on Sep 12, 2016 in Charts and Graphs, Excel Howtos, Huis, Posts by Hui
Stacked Bar and Indicator Arrow Chart – Tutorial

Learn how to develop a Stacked Bar chart with Indicator Arrow in this Tutorial

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