Hi Chandoo,
I've seen some of your ideas for making charts interactive (filters, for example) and they are really neat. I do have a question about adding the kind of interactive functionality that some very large BI software vendors have - and that is the idea of a clickable, column chart.
I apologize if you have already answered this somewhere else, but the scenario I'm thinking of is something like this. Let's say I have a list of costs for my groceries, presented in a column chart. The initial categories for my list would be Fruits, Vegetables, Dairy, Breads. If I click on Dairy, I would get another column chart that says Cheeses, Milk, and Yogurt. Finally, if I click on Cheeses, I would see another column chart with the costs of all the types of cheeses I buy.
Essentially I want to continue to drill down until I get to the bottom layer of "the onion". Although I could this if I always had 3 levels of drilldown, I'm not necessarily going to have 3 levels all the time for all my food categories. Sometimes, I might have less; sometimes more. So, that is why I thought that adding 3 filters to the chart wouldn't necessarily handle the case when I had 4 levels of dropdown.
So, my question is whether there is an easy way to do this in Excel (with or without macros). I realize that I could write a custom solution for each particular chart I want, but that is not really what I'm after. I'm more interested in a template or technique that I could apply to several charts with different levels of data.
Thank you in advance for considering this question.
Regards,
Scotty
I've seen some of your ideas for making charts interactive (filters, for example) and they are really neat. I do have a question about adding the kind of interactive functionality that some very large BI software vendors have - and that is the idea of a clickable, column chart.
I apologize if you have already answered this somewhere else, but the scenario I'm thinking of is something like this. Let's say I have a list of costs for my groceries, presented in a column chart. The initial categories for my list would be Fruits, Vegetables, Dairy, Breads. If I click on Dairy, I would get another column chart that says Cheeses, Milk, and Yogurt. Finally, if I click on Cheeses, I would see another column chart with the costs of all the types of cheeses I buy.
Essentially I want to continue to drill down until I get to the bottom layer of "the onion". Although I could this if I always had 3 levels of drilldown, I'm not necessarily going to have 3 levels all the time for all my food categories. Sometimes, I might have less; sometimes more. So, that is why I thought that adding 3 filters to the chart wouldn't necessarily handle the case when I had 4 levels of dropdown.
So, my question is whether there is an easy way to do this in Excel (with or without macros). I realize that I could write a custom solution for each particular chart I want, but that is not really what I'm after. I'm more interested in a template or technique that I could apply to several charts with different levels of data.
Thank you in advance for considering this question.
Regards,
Scotty