Excel Beginner - How to create a simple elegant chart?

[Gamerade]

Hello all, This is my first post so please be kind!!


Question/Challenge:

I'm looking for a way to display lots of information in a chart, without the bars becoming very thin and having lots of white space between the bars. I have tried for hours and cannot seem to figure out the best way to present this data.


Link to spreadsheet:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AoymAz7wqHDjdENvcGxEQU01b1pkcGFrMk81amdXYUE&hl=en&authkey=CKus5qYM


UPDATE: For some reason my charts do not appear when I upload to google docs?? I placed the chart here as well ---> http://www.mediafire.com/?156ger7abq0y8yw


What I have done.

In the spreadsheet there are 3 sheets,

1. the "data" sheet, contains the information to be displayed in the chart

2. "chart" (Is what was created in 2003 if I clicked on the chart button, yes I know hideous!)

3. "chart 2" is my best attempt to clean it up (I was able to get the values to be legible above the bars), the problem is the bars are so thin and there is a lot of white space in between the bars also, I found it tough to fit on one page without messing the values up.


Any suggestions from community?:

How would you display this information? I know there are many fancy things you can do with excel but sometimes how to create something useful and simple is just as difficult for some reason (at least for me!)


Thank you so much!

-Pablo


PS> Awesome community, I have already learned so much!

 

[dan_l]

I am not a chart guru. However, the answer to almost every charting question is: it depends - mostly on what you want to show.


Chandoo has an great tutorial on an incell panel chart:

http://chandoo.org/wp/2010/04/01/incell-panel-chart/


That might be good. There's a couple of different implementations of it you can do. I do something similar from time to time, although I don't change the sort order, rather I leave the 'categories' ranked, and use the data validation to highlight a row heading across each category, so it becomes _kind of_ like a bump chart.


One of your limiting factors here is the presence of 0 values. It sort of precludes you from getting cute with SFE or other such things.

 

[dan_l]

Actually strike that:


it sucks with all the 0 values. How about 12 different bar charts----small multiple style.


http://www.google.com/images?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=small%20multiples&oe=utf-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1366&bih=566

 

[Gamerade]

Thank you Dan, yes the zero values is the problem. Is there any way to get rid of them? For example, just display the bars that have values?

 

[Hui]

Gamerade

I like your chart as it is!


2 Reasons:

If I want to see how a particular group went, it is in the same position in each chart and hence easy to skim between charts and see where they are, regardless of the blanks


If I want to see how people went within a particular outcome it is also clear.


I don't think the blanks take away from the presentation at all.


Have you tried very feint horizontal gridlines at say every 50 or 100 units and

Instead of having the actual values as a Label, change them to be the groups ie: PM, Technical Lead = TL etc

 

[Gamerade]

Thank you Hui, I will try some of your suggestions. I like the idea of the lighter gridlines. I think I'm going to start going through some of the tutorials on here and just get different ideas on how to create charts. Thank you for your input!