Mustache and Excel?!? Sounds as unlikely as 3D pie charts & Peltier. But I have a story to tell. So grab a cup of coffee and follow me.
Few months ago, I chanced up on a highly entertaining blog on money, retirement & living a kick-ass life. Reading Mr. Money Mustache is much like I am talking to myself. Almost all of his money philosophies, values & hacks are similar to what we practice at Chandoo household. Immediately I got hooked. In a span of 2 weeks, I read more than 100 articles, often making Jo suspicious what I was doing so much on her iPad.
At this point, you must be thinking -“Dude, what has all this got to do with Excel?!?”
And I am coming to that. One of the ideas Mr. Money Mustache preaches is small regular expenses can add up to massive amounts of cash (or ‘stash as he calls it) over several years. Now that we do not have a full time job, live in a small town & crave little, we barely spend anything. But I can relate to his idea. For example, if you spend a few dollars everyday at local coffee shop, over 10 years, this could add up to more than $10,000. Money that could be used for other worthy goals like early retirement or starting your dream company. Mind you, I have nothing against coffee. In fact, I brew two cups of lovely cappuccino every morning so that Jo and I can savor it before the kids wake up and start the hulk_in_the_house program. It is another thing that the last time I bought a cup of coffee is when I was in Australia in June. But the important idea here is that regular expenses should be carefully monitored and pruned.
“What?!? You are talking about coffee and kids. Where is Excel?!?”
Ok, I am done with the build up. So one fine morning, I emailed Mr. Money Mustache, introduced myself as somewhat spreadsheet skilled and shared a file I created with him, using which community at his site can see how regular expense cuts can impact their savings. He was kind enough to publish it here.
A growing mustache chart
Well, I am not sure what else to call it. So lets stick with growing mustache chart. Here is how it works:
- You enter a sufficiently large number ie the money you want to accumulate to retire or do something equally awesome.
- You also enter your regular expenses (daily, weekly, monthly, annual or one time) and amounts.
- Then it magically calculates how much money you would save by cutting them.
- All this is shown in a dynamic chart that depicts your target and actual as mustaches
See this demo:
This is so cool, how is it made?
There are 4 steps to our growing mustache Excel chart.
1. Calculating future value of regular expenses
Question: If you consume $3.50 latte every day for next ten years, how much would you spend?
Answer: Gee! Sounds like a big problem, let me grab a cup of coffee first!
On a more serious note, the future value of these little expenses depends on rate of return as well. That is, instead of gulping down $3.50 in a hurry, if you saved the money the return you get on yearly basis.
For our calculations, we can assume a 7% return. This gives a future value of$18,498.
You can use the formula =FV(7%/365,365*10,3.5) to get this value.
So the multiplication factor is 5,285 (18,498 divided by $3.5)
For our calculations, we can use a simple multiplication factor table so that we can focus on growing mustache than financial mumb0-jumbo.
2. Calculating Totals
Once we know the future values of all such regular expenses, we just need a small table like this that shows the totals:
3. Create a bubble chart
Next, we create a bubble chart with 2 bubbles. 1 for the actual mustache & 1 for target mustache.
4. Convert bubbles to mustaches
Hermione would know a great spell to instantly turn our boring bubbles to mighty mustaches (bulla-mustacium ?). But since we are muggles, lets focus on Excel trickery.
We need the chart on right from our bubbles:
First get a nice handlebar mustache image from web, like this:
- Then, copy the gray color mustache (ctrl+c)
- Next, select outer bubble (target) and press paste (ctrl+v)
- Now, the bubble becomes mustache!
- Repeat the steps for actual bubble too.
That is all!
Download Excel Mustache Chart
Click here to download this chart and play with it. Examine the formulas in “Stash chart” sheet to see how it works.
Do you like the growing mustache chart?
I really liked how this turned out. Simple yet effective. Readers at Mr. Money Mustache site loved it too.
What about you? Did you enjoy this trick. Are you planning to cut any regular expenses after reading this? Please share using comments.
More on Excel and your money
I believe in being frugal, consuming less and living a simple life. So naturally we talk about using Excel to keep track of your expenses, investments, understand the impact of small changes etc. Check out below links to see more on Excel & your money.
- Expense trackers in Excel
- Household Budget Tracker
- Stock Portfolio Tracker
- Excel retirement calculator
- Interactive mortgage payment calculator
- Mutual Fund Portfolio Tracker [for India only]
33 Responses to “Show Months & Years in Charts without Cluttering”
Very CooOOOoool 🙂
Would it work if I merely change the display format for the dates, or do they actually need to be retyped in that format (Nov, Dec, etc)?
ps- it's only about 34 donuts per month, or slightly more than 1 per day. Yum!
To make it work automatically when you create a chart, delete the labels above the Year and Month columns, but keep the label above the Y data (Donuts). The blank cells tell Excel that the first row and first two columns (indicated by the blanks) are special, so it uses the first row for series names an the first two columns for X axis labels.
This is better than the other kind of donut chart, but you'll soon be carrying a big donut around your midsection.
First off, thank you Chandoo for being respectful and taking out the "Jesus" comment. Not that I'd threaten to kill you, or start world-wide riots, or make you go into hiding if you didn't (as OTHERS would; wink, wink, nudge, nudge)... I just really appreciate your respectulness and consideration; so thank you. I was meaning to write you about it, but when I came to your site you'd already made the edit... so again, thank you!
Secondly, I wanna say I think there's an easier way to do what you are demonstrating. I've got a pivot chart with months of data and all I had to do was right-click the x axis and then select "format axis", under "Axis Options" there's a check-box that says "Multi-level Category Labels". The chart I was able to do this on was a pivotchart however so maybe it wouldn't be that easy for a non-pivotchart.
Anyway, love the site. Keep up the good work. Thanks also for being so open about your success, it's very encouraging and motivating.
God (aka Jesus) Bless. 🙂
Hi Chandoo - great site! Another option to save space is to simply rotate the orientation of the text by 90 degrees, so the dates read vertical rather than horizontal. However, I like the elegance of your solution also.
Hey Chandoo -- Great tip. Only yesterday I was working through some strange behaviour with formatting dates in PivotCharts. Seems the axes never want to cooperate. This is a neat and elegant solution I hadn't thought of using. May need to abandon pivotcharts to use formulas like that, but if we use dynamic named ranges, no big sacrifice.
BTW, whatever did you do to get your site blocked in China? Never heard of regime change by a grass-root spreadsheet movement. Maybe your ISP is hosting some problem sites. Chandoo.org is certainly worth it for me to fire up the VPN, but I'm sure you would lose a lot of other visitors from the middle kingdom.
Chandoo ... pls help.. the link is blocked over here... pls can you put the regular link... 🙂
@JP... Excel Axis formatting is linked to cell formatting by default. So you can just have the dates which are formatted to look like months (mmm).
@Erin: It was not my intention to mock anyone's faith or religion. I just used the word as it is quite common. I decided to remove it as I got 2 emails from readers requesting for the same.
Also, the pivot charts take pivot table groupings by default, so you need not do any of the above while making charts from pivot tables.
@Kein: I am not sure why Chinese authorities decided to block my site. I wish they would actually look at the content instead of blocking sites based on simple text matching rules.
@Kapil: The file is mirrored here: http://chandoo.org/img/d/date-axis-months-years-trick.xls
Cool, really cool...
Nice one Chandoo,
Also would like to mention abt useful method while creating dynamic charts.
In any chart where in the months keep on adding - instead of changing the range for the chart every time we add a month, we can actually format the months as dates (probably 1st of every month) still keep the format as "mmm" AND while selecting the data, we can select a huge rows (date column) once and for all, and the chart adjusts automatically with the data that we entered. So next month when I enter Dec's data, I need not change the source data of the chart, however it automatically adjusts.
Hope I made sense.!
Regards,
SS
Thanks, Chandoo! This is a great tip - one that I will definitely put to use. I typically have an axis with mmm yy format, aligned vertically, but this will definitely look a bit cleaner (except in cases where the chart is too small for the axis labels to be displayed horizontally, even without the mmm yy on one line). Thanks again!
Tom
Chandoo,
Thank you for the posts you are very diligent not to mention very helpful. I would like to know how to get the separation lines on the axis? For example your candy sales chart has longer lines separating east and west how do you format that?
Thanks for being very awesome!
-Josh
Hi Chandoo, we can look the formulas because there is a message:"Unsupported features".
Could you send a diferent Link ?
Thanks.
@SS But what if you've got formulas in the data block (i.e where you would enter static data for the month of december)? My chart now shows #N/A #N/A in the axis with no data for all future dates.
Chandoo, I've got a dynamic range set up showing #N/A errors for future dates. The MMM-DD date format format in row works fine, but when I use YYYY and MMM in two rows, the axis shows #N/A #N/A for all future dates with no data. How would you go about keeping those future months hidden?
Matt -
In order for the axis to automatically extend to the dates within the range and ignore #N/A at the end, you need a date-scale axis, and for this you need to use one column with the complete date, not two columns with year and month.
If you want to use two columns, you need to generate Names in the worksheet which define ranges only as long as the number of months. I have a review of dynamic chart approaches in http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/dynamic-chart-review/ and a whole category on my blog at http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/category/dynamic-charts/. Chandoo also has examples of his own on this site.
How do you make a dynamic chart out of this?
I can't get the axis labels range right.
I tried something like this:
=OFFSET(REPORT!$H$10:$I$10;0;0;COUNTA(REPORT!$H$10:$I$100);1)
Any idea?
Ethan -
Your offset formula defines a range 1 row in size, but the technique here requires 2 rows. Your definition should end with
;2)
instead of
;1)
Thanks Jon,
Got it working now
Great! Now, is there any way to do this directly in Powerpoint? I don't like having linked excel files, so I create the graphs right inside Powerpoint, any way to do this there? I tried and was unsuccessful.
Thanks.
Cool tip Chandoo......thanks
[...] extract year and month from dates to avoid a mess in our stock chart. Chandoo has a great post: Show Months & Years in Charts without ClutteringIn cell B2:=YEAR(D2)In cell B3:=IF(YEAR(D3)=YEAR(D2), "", YEAR(D3))Cell C2:=IF(TEXT(D2, [...]
Hi there,
I have got a data ranging for 3 years. I want to show a chart which shows Jan of 2011, 2012 and 2013 together side by side; then Feb11, Feb12 and Feb13 side by side, then Mar11, Mar12 and Mar13, and so on until December.
Please help. Thanks.
@Bilal
Do you want a number of charts next to each other as separate charts or the data next to each other in a single chart?
What type of chart were you thinking about?
Can you post your data for us to review?
Refer upload instructions at: http://chandoo.org/forum/threads/posting-a-sample-workbook.451/
Hi there
Very good solution this. I have another question on it, though. How do you format the X-axis with monthly gaps (ie, with labels "Jan 2012", "Apr", "Jul", "Oct", "Jan 2013", "Mar", etc), when you're dealing with a data series with weekly or daily data points? The Axis Options dialogue box doesn't appear to offer "Date axis" as an option under the "Axis Type" section.
I've managed to do it in one case with weekly data by setting the interval between tick marks at 13 -- the approximate number of weeks in a quarter -- to get 3-month intervals. But this wouldn't work if I wanted to show 1-month intervals, or had a more detailed daily data series to work with.
Any luck getting the dates to work on a scatter graph? I'm only getting numbers. Works fine on line graphs though.
How can we do the vice versa? i.e. on the x-axis showing year on the level 1, and months on level 2.
I wanted to build these kind of axis labels for 5 years, with year on top and months at the bottom, but it should form in such a way that the seperating lines should seperate the entire data set only at December of each year, and no lines in between any month.
@Apoorve
Just re-arrange the columns
You need to put a space in all cells where you don't want a year
See the attached file
http://chandoo.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Chart-for-Apoorve.xlsx
Unfortunately you don't get any control over lines its all or nothing.
Hello - the link seems to be broken:
http://cid-b663e096d6c08c74.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/date-axis-months-years-trick.xls
Regards.
Like!!
Three times already today I have used this website and saved a ton of work time in researching excel tricks.
Suggestion: Why not have a "like" or "this article was useful to me" button. That way you can see what is most useful by your users and maybe generate more content based on those "likes".
Just saying. Thanks again and you're doing a great job!
Thanks for the tip. However, I couldn't download your file. The link is broken.
Thank You for taking the time to post this tip. I hope that you have a blessed day.
The link does not work properly and I'm not sure how to actually get the graph to display like this, its frustrating me a tonne. I cant work out what to google either to find an answer elsewhere! 🙁
Is this possible with waterfall chart. Data hereunder -
Years Abbrevation Amt
2020 BEG 2,006
REV 1,950
EMP 1,058
DM (3,244)
OOE 1,078
OPMT 182
AB (638)
END 2,392
2021 REV 8,534
EMP 67
DM (2,142)
OOE (3,120)
OPMT 510
AB 1,008
END 7,249