Visualize Excel Salary Data & You could win XBOX 360 + Kinect Bundle [Contest]
Its contest time again! Put on your creative hats & bring your Excel skills to the game.
Analyze more than 1900 survey responses & present your results in a stunning fashion, and you could walk away with an XBOX 360 + Kinect Sports Bundle (valued at $299).
Sounds interesting? Read on.
Give more details by showing average and distribution [Charting Tips]
When we have lots of data, we try to summarize it by calculating the average. As they say, averages are mean, they do not give away much.
I want to share with you an interesting example from Amazon.com on how they give more details by combining average with distribution.
As you might know, Amazon shows the rating of each of the products they sell. Customers & users rate the products from 1 to 5 stars. When you visit the product page you will see the average rating. But there is a small down-arrow next to it. When you click on it, Amazon shows you the break-up of that rating so you have a better idea of how the ratings are split.
Show Top 10 Values in Dashboards using Pivot Tables
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.
90% of you can see up to cell M26 & other findings [visualization]
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.
How to hide “0” in chart axis [quick tip]
Have you ever wondered how you can hide that 0 (zero) at axis bottom? Like shown beside. You can use custom cell formatting codes (or custom number formatting codes) to do just that. Just go to axis formatting and from the number tab set the axis number format to something like #,##0;-#,##0;; Read the rest of the post to learn more.
What is the most embarrassing charting mistake you made? [weekend poll]
This week’s poll is very simple. What is the the most embarrassing charting mistake your made?
For me it has to be that one time when I made a sports dashboard using excel. I have adjusted the axis scale of a bar chart so that my favorite cricket player (Sachin Tendulkar, who else?)’s records are emphasized. In a matter of minutes I have received several comments from all over world pointing out the mistake. Even though, the intention was to highlight the achievements of master blaster, the axis adjustment was obviously a mistake.
Zoho sponsors our Visualization Challenge #2
Aravind (@arvindnatarajan on twitter) who works at Zoho emailed me earlier today and asked if Zoho Reports – Online Reporting and Business Intelligence Service, can sponsor our visualization challenge #2.