This is a guest post by Faseeh, one of the Excel Ninja’s at our forum.
Triangular plot…! What is it?
Recently, a Chandoo.org forum member asked this,
I want to be able to make a graph that, in some aspects, looks like below, but I have no idea how to do it at all.
After seeing it, I said to myself in Barney Stinson’s tone, ‘Challenge Accepted!‘
The final plot is like this:
Making triangular plot in Excel – Tutorial
The first step to create such a chart starts from a manual drawing of how your chart will be looking like; at least you need to mark some important connecting points that will make smaller triangles.
The trick in this chart is simply to locate points in all three sides of the triangle and connect them in a way that results in smaller triangle. Here is a step by step approach to make this chart:
- Make a rough sketch of the triangle. Divide each side of the triangle roughly into the number of segments that you want, each side with equal number of segments (in this case 05 segments). And give each of them a number including corners of the triangle
- Now we can split this chart into three types of lines, horizontal, tilted towards right, tilted toward left.
- For each of these lines we need to join certain points and when we combine these lines into a single series we will get our desired chart. So let’s list down the points in each line.
Horizontal Lines (L1): Point 01, 02, 03, 04, 06, 05, 07, 08, 10, 09, 11.
Right Lines (L2): Point 01, 11, 09, 12, 13, 07, 05, 14, 15, 03, 02
Left Lines (L3): Point 02, 11, 10, 15, 14, 08, 06, 13, 12, 04, 01 - Now we need to setup a table where the coordinates of these points are listed in tabular order, like this:
This can be done by using trigonometric ratio of sine and cosine, by representing each point in terms of Polar Coordinates [ These coordinates represent each point in terms of a distance “R” and an angle represented by Greek alphabet Theta (q), Line 01 makes an angle of 0° from X-Axis, Line 02 of 60° and Line 03 of 120° from +ive X- Axis, these details can be simply skipped if you don’t like math 😉 ]
Avoiding the details of trigonometry you can simply use following two formulas to get these values…For Value of X (Ordinate) you can use the following formula:
=IF(O6=”H”,N6*COS(RADIANS(Q6)),IF(O6=”L”,N6*COS(RADIANS(Q6)),$D$5+N6*COS(RADIANS(Q6))))For Y (Abscissa) you can use following:
=IF(O6=”H”,N6*SIN(RADIANS(Q6)),IF(O6=”L”,N6*SIN(RADIANS(Q6)),N6*SIN(RADIANS(Q6)))) - Once this Lookup Table is created we need to create another table where we list points in accordance to the Lines that we have already created. We will use VLOOKUP () to fetch the corresponding coordinate through this formula and we will do this for all the three Lines. The VLOOKUP() simply looks for the point in the left most column of the first table and bring the corresponding values from the 3rd and 4th column to form the point in second table.
- When we are done with bringing the coordinates of all of these points we just need to plot a Scatter Chart. Now use a XY scatter chart to plot the data. You need to add only one series, actually there are three types of lines but we can accommodate them in just one series. When they overlap, they will give smaller triangles in result.
Download Triangular Plot workbook
Click here to download the chart. Examine the formulas & chart series to understand how this is made.
Added by Chandoo
Do you make such complex charts for your work?
I will be honest. I never had to make a triangle plot. But then, I never had to make Ratatouille either. That doesn’t make me appreciate both of them any less. I think this chart shows fantastic technique. It also proves that Excel is highly flexible if you know which bolt to turn and which screw to tighten.
What about you? Do you make such complex charts or visual analysis for your work? What is the most challenging chart you have worked on? Please share using comments.
Shape up your Chart skills – Charts + Shapes
If your job involves making charts in all shapes and sizes, then you are in luck. Check out these tutorials to learn how to bend Excel charting rules to get any shape you want:
- Simulating a pendulum movement using Excel charts
- Wall hygrometric physics – modeling wall thickness in Excel chart
- Stars and lights using Excel Charts, VBA & animation
- Mustache shaped chart to measure your stash
- Spoke chart | 5 star chart
- Making various country flags using Excel charts
Thank you Faseeh
Many thanks to Faseeh for sharing this tutorial with all of us. I really enjoyed this and learned a few tricks from it.
If you like this chart, say thanks to Faseeh using comments.
7 Responses to “Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!”
I would like to see actual hash-tagged DM tweets go out to the specific information consumers. That would be an interesting way to communicate the key daily data to interested parties.
A Twitter-like secure application like Yammer might be a good fit with this.
For example, how about daily tweets to selected user groups (secure) that would display sales, bookings, cash receipts, cash disbursed and a second version that would show the same info for MTD, QTD or YTD figures.
@Dan, it would be great. I did not taught about implementing it on this dashboard because twitter is blocked to the whole intranet here. However, there's a discussion here about how can we send these tweets to blackberries (probably through e-mail) automatically. (I'd like to see this implemented on a jabber restricted network as well, but here it'll probably not happen)
The wrap-up versions you mentioned doesn't apply to my particular scenario, but on a sales tweetboard it would be a great tool indeed - choosing who will receive which message according to hashtags. I'll think on something, thanks for the advice. 🙂
(Ah, btw, I'm Fernando... 🙂 )
@Dan: That is a fun idea. Instead of tightly integrating twitter functionality with a dashboard, i think it would be cool if we have a "tweet this" button that users can click after selecting a range of cells. We can easily show a dialog with the concatenated output of the selected cells and ask user to edit the text and eventually "send to twitter".
For eg. you can select the annual sales figure cell and click on "tweet this" button upon which a dialog will show the value. Then you can pre-pend it something like "DM @boss look at our sales this year: "
@Aires.. thanks once again.
Wow it looks really good. Not sure though how much the tweet facility would help in real world project management, but certainly having a dashboard on a project should be a key deliverable when learning how to manage a project
The other use of this is during the software development life cycle especially when you have parallel streams of development and testing going on. Using a dashboard is a quick way for everyone on the team to see where the project is at and how it all fits together.
Regards
Susan de Sousa
Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com
Hi Chandoo,
I purchased the project management toolkit but the dashboard shown above with the imbedded scroll bars. Is it included in the project pack??
Thanks
Sue
The gantt chart section of this dashboard is similar to one I have recently created: http://xlcalibre.com/hr-dashboard-gantt-chart-traffic-light-reportIt has a similar approach with scroll bars, but has a couple of additional features. I've tried to incorporate a traffic light report element, and also allow the timescale to adjusted so that can view it by days, weeks or months.I really like the other tables that you've incorporated, I may well try to replicate them to improve my version!
I am a monitoring and evaluation consultant in international development, and one of the services I offer is to help non-profits and foundations develop performance dashboards. I often advise them to develop dashboards for ongoing programs, rather than for one-time or pilot projects, because of the time involved. I am trying to find out from a few people how long it takes you to develop a project management dashboard, and to what extent the indicators vary from one project to the next.