Top X chart – Show Top X values of a chart Interactively
Two charting principles we hear all the time are,
- Sort your data in a meaningful order before plotting it.
- Show only relevant information, not everything – because un-necessary information clutters the chart.
Today we will learn a dynamic charting technique that will mix these two ideas in a useful way. I call this a Top X chart.
Switch Rows and Columns in Charts [Quick Charting Tip]
Let us say you have built a nice chart showing your sales and profits for the top 5 products (learn how to highlight top 5 products in a list), with products on X axis. Suddenly your boss wants to switch the rows to columns (or transpose the chart) so that she can see metric level grouping instead of product level grouping. No need to freak out and rush to Espresso machine, You can do it very easily with Excel Charting features.
In today’s quick tip you will learn how to swap chart rows and columns in excel.
Using Combo Charts to Group Related Time Events [Charting Goodness]
In his latest book, Now You See It, on pages 165 and 166 of the book, Stephen Few discusses how grouping related time intervals can facilitate analysis of data. As an illustration he explains that when viewing data of daily website visits, it helps in separating weekdays and weekends to differentiate expected traffic during these periods. The use of this technique would make it easier for the analyst to identify any anomalous movement in ether the weekend or the week day.
Fortunately excel combo charts can help you do that. In this guest post, Paresh explains to us how to do this.
2 Great Pieces of Advice for Chart Makers, Dashboard Designers and Story Tellers Everywhere
The worldwide web is a wonderful place. I am constantly amazed by the simple yet very effective stuff we can learn by just reading. Today I want to share with you two very great pieces of advice: Seth Godin’s 4 Simple Principles for making effective graphs: Seth Godin is probably one of the most remarkable, […]
Create a Combination Chart, Add Secondary Axis in Excel [15 Second Tutorial]
Two most commonly asked or searched queries when it comes to charting are,
- How to combine two chart types in one chart, like a line chart combined with bar chart?
- How to add a secondary axis to the chart so that one or more data series are plotted on the secondary axis?
Watch this video tutorial to learn how to do both in less than 15 seconds.
Watch it on youtube: Creating combination charts and adding secondary axis – video tutorial
Are you focusing on F word or S word? [Charting Principles]
When you are making a chart next time, spend just 5 minutes (or even less) on the formatting and give more time (may be 20 minutes) to think about the story.
Interview With Presentation Zen’s Garr Reynolds on Charting & Telling Stories
As mentioned earlier, I have met Garr Reynolds of presentation zen fame in Malmo, Sweden last Friday. What was to be a quick 15 minute interview became a 2 hour lengthy discussion on presentations, charting, excel, data, Japanese culture and of course our pointy haired dilbert blog. Read the entire interview in the post.