Archive for November, 2009

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.

Here is a challenge many people face. How to make a chart visualizing sales data with several dimensions like product, brand, region, sales person name, year (or month or quarter) and one or two values like sales, # of units sold, profits, # of new customers.

In visualization challenge #2, all you have to do is a make a chart or dashboard to visualize this sales data effectively.

Today we will learn a new and exciting excel formula – the all powerful SUMPRODUCT.

At the outset SUMPRODUCT formula may not seem like all that useful. But once you understand how excel works with lists (or arrays) of data, the SUMPRODUCT’s relevance becomes crystal clear.

Folks, I have an announcement for you. Our little site, Pointy Haired Dilbert got yet another face lift. Over the weekend, I have made some changes to the site layout and navigation to make it better. The key changes are, On archive pages (that is category, tag and monthly pages) you can see 15 posts […]

It has been a really long time since we have an excel links post here. That doesnt mean I am not reading anything exciting. It is just that I have gotten busy being a dad. But now that I am in to a saner schedule, we are bringing back the excel links. Here is a […]

Egil, one of our alert readers from Norway sent this to me in e-mail, which I swear, I am not making up – A Fancy Gauge Chart. See the e-mail and chart yourself. I’m having a lot of fun with your gauge template 🙂 To make it more industrial-like, I’ve added: 1. Brushed metal background […]

Anyone working on the data using excel will know the importance of lookup formulas. They are vital for making almost any spreadsheet or dashboard. That is why when my friend John Franco, who maintains Excel-Spreadsheet-Authors.com, wrote to me about his new book Excel lookup toolbox I was truly excited. In this post I am going to share my review of this product.

Yesterday while checking my website analytics reports on Google analytics site, I have noticed a new beta feature called “Intelligence”. Out of curiosity I clicked on it. It took me to a an intelligence alert dashboard. Ok, lets just back up for a minute and understand what “intelligence dashboard” is before moving on. In the […]

We all have atleast one story of how that one time the boss / co-worker / classmate / cat ruined the carefully crafted excel spreadsheet by mucking up the formulas or disturbing the formatting. Read this post to learn 10 awesome excel tips to make better and boss-proof excel sheets.

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.