a picture is worth a thousand word (best graph for a sitution)

[Lawrence Dodge]

Hi all--

I am trying to determine busy times vs. slow times. I have a spreadsheet that has 1 Oct to 27 Dec as column headers, each column as a list of times that a test was done on that day. Some days the test was run 5 times, some day 100 times. I am trying to graph what times are the most dense for test. I envision a line chart (per week?) that has a different colored line per day with times on the x axis and amounts on the y axis. I just can't seem to set it up correctly. Does anyone have any suggestions for this to work even a different chart type. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

LCD

 

[keymaster]

@LCD... interesting question.


I would use conditional formatting heat maps to depict how busy each hourly block is. If your times are spread across only working hours (like 9 to 5), this would not take too much space and looks elegant. Not to mention, easy to implement and fast.


See these example images.


Busy vs. Lean times by day:


http://img.chandoo.org/playground/busy-vs-lean-times-chart-1.png


Busy vs. Lean times by weekday:


http://img.chandoo.org/playground/busy-vs-lean-times-chart-2.png


Download this file to see how you can do the same.


http://img.chandoo.org/playground/busy-vs-lean-times-chart-lawrence.xlsx

 

[stemelliott]

If you want to chart it, then you could look at the surface chart type. It is quite good at showing 3 dimentional data, where the Peaks and troughs are the volume.


You could try a bubble chart - where the size/colour of the bubble show volume of occurrences, but I think these are harder to understand - and very hard to set up correctly.

 

[Lawrence Dodge]

Thank you stemelliott and Chandoo (I am honored you picked my question). As soon as I get a chance I will play with these and see what I and come up with, unfortunately Chandoo the time range is 24 hours so it won't be as neat and tidy as I (and you) would like to see it.

LCD