35 shortcuts & tricks to make you an #AWESOME Data Analyst
Analyst’s life is busy. We have to gather data, clean it up, analyze it, dig the stories buried in it, present them, convince our bosses about the truth, gather more evidence, run tests, simulations or scenarios, share more insights, grab a cup of coffee and start all over again with a different problem.
So today let me share with you 35 shortcuts, productivity hacks and tricks to help you be even more awesome.
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.
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.
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.
Modelling Inventory Run Rate & Cash Flows using Excel
Imagine you run an office furniture company. You want to stop reordering two brands of furniture – Relaxer (a type of chair) and Boca Top (a type of table). You currently have 20,000 Relaxer chairs and 5,000 Boca Tops. These are valued at $200,000 and $100,000 respectively. When sold, they will yield $100,000 and $25,000 gross profit. You are hoping to sell them off in 2 or 3 years. You forecast that we can sell off these as per some yearly schedule.
You need to analyze this and prepare a cash flow model.
Let’s learn how to answer such open ended questions using various analysis techniques in Excel.
On / Off conditional formatting with this simple trick
Here is a quick & awesome way to make your dashboards sexy. Add an on / off switch to your conditional formats.
Take a look at above demo to understand what I mean.
“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.