“How Trump happened” in Excel [visualizations]
During last week, an alert reader of our blog, Jørgen emailed me a link to “How Trump happened“. It is an interactive visualization by Wall Street Journal. Jørgen asked me if we could replicate the visualization in Excel. My response: “Making a new chart in Excel? Hell yeah!”
Read on for awesome visualizations and full explanation.
Generate a snow flake pattern Excel [holiday fun]
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.
CP048: How to create animated charts in Excel?
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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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
Use shapes to enhance your Excel charts [tip]
Here is a simple way to enhance your Excel charts – use shapes & pictures in your charts.
We will learn how to create something like above.
Looks interesting? Read on…
How to create dynamic sparklines for latest 30 days [video]
Sparklines are fun and very insightful. They are easy to create, easy to maintain and fit into any dashboard.
But there is one tiny problem with them. Usually we have a lot of data, but we don’t to visualize all of it. We just want to visualize latest 30 days trend or last 12 months trend or QTD or something similar. What then?
In this video, learn a powerful and very simple way to create dynamic sparklines using Excel.
Introduction to Slicers – What are they, how to use them, tips, advanced techniques & interactive reports using Excel Slicers
Slicers are one of my favorite feature in Excel. And here is a quick demo to show why they are my favorite.
Slicers – what are they?
Slicers are visual filters. Using a slicer, you can filter your data (or pivot table, pivot chart) by clicking on the type of data you want.
For example, let’s say you are looking at sales by customer profession in a pivot report. And you want to see how the sales are for a particular region. There are 2 options for you do drill down to an individual region level.
- Add region as report filter and filter for the region you want.
- Add a slicer on region and click on the region you want.
With a report filter (or any other filter), you will have to click several times to pick one store. With slicers, it is a matter of simple click.
Read more to learn all about slicers
Changing stubborn opinions with visualizations [case study]
We, analysts take pride in the fact that we tell stories. But what if you have a boss, client or colleague who wouldn’t buy the story?
This is a problem we face often. Let’s say your boss has stubborn opinion about something, like more advertising leads to more sales. You know the data doesn’t support this theory. But how do you change your boss’ mind?
Here is an interesting way, showcased in NY Times recently.