Or more appropriately titled, the one where Power Query solves the problem in less time than it takes you to say Get & Transform Data.
Recently, one of my students Mr. K, sent me a pivot table problem.
Today my boss asked me “how much we paid to staff since the inception of our business with their respective date of joining?” He wanted to know, level wise summary of the last 16 years (on Quarterly / Year wise basis).
The records appended from the database month wise. Have a look to the file and give your ideas.
Mr. K’s data looked like this.
and his boss wanted a report like this:
What now?
The obvious solution – VLOOKUPs and patience
Even before I could go thru Mr. K’s problem and reply to him, he wrote back to me saying that he found the solution.
He used what I call as VLOOKUP and patience method. First he unpivoted original data using 233,000+ VLOOKUPs . Then he created a new pivot table from this unpivoted data to answer his boss’s questions.
While this method is fine, it consumes a lot of time and coffee.
A better solution – Power Query and pop corn
We, humans are not evolved to write two hundred thousand VLOOKUPs in afternoons. We are better at building powerful machines, watch them do bad ass work while we chew delicious pop corn.
So why not let the computer solve the problem?
Here is the ridiculously simple four step tutorial to get the same results.
- Load the data in to Power Query using From Table feature.
- Unpivot all the monthly data columns
- Load the data in to Excel as a new table
- Pivot it to create the report we need.
All this takes less than 15 seconds. Whenever you have new data, simply refresh the connection and everything (PQ, Pivot tables) gets updated.
Download the example workbook
Here is the workbook just in case you need to see everything. Please use Excel 2013 or above to play with this.
More power to you
Power Query is a truly remarkable feature of Excel. It saves you a lot of time and hassle. If you are new to Power Query (also known as Get & Transform data in Excel 2016), check out below tutorials to get started.
- Introduction to Power Query
- Import and work with web data using PQ
- Unpivot data with Power Query – an example
How would you solve this?
Prior to Power Query, I would have used VBA (as there is a lot of data) for something like this. For smaller data sets, I would have used VLOOKUPs.
What about you? What method would you use to rearrange data like this? Please share your tips in the comments section.
14 Responses to “Group Smaller Slices in Pie Charts to Improve Readability”
I think the virtue of pie charts is precisely that they are difficult to decode. In many contexts, you have to release information but you don't want the relationship between values to jump at your reader. That's when pie charts are most useful.
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Chandoo,
millions of ants cannot be mistaken.....There should be a reason why everybody continues using Pie charts, despite what gurus like you or Jon and others say.
one reason could be because we are just used to, so that's what we need to change, the "comfort zone"...
i absolutely agree, since I've been "converted", I just find out that bar charts are clearer, and nicer to the view...
Regards,
Martin
[...] says we can Group Smaller Slices in Pie Charts to Improve Readability. Such a pie has too many labels to fit into a tight space, so you need ro move the labels around [...]
Chandoo -
You ask "Can I use an alternative to pie chart?"
I answer in You Say “Pie”, I Say “Bar”.
This visualization was created because it was easy to print before computers. In this day and age, it should not exist.
I think the 100% Bar Chart is just as useless/unreadable as Pies - we should rename them something like Mama's Strudel Charts - how big a slice would you like, Dear?
My money's with Jon on this topic.
The primary function of any pie chart with more than 2 or 3 data points is to obfuscate. But maybe that is the main purpose, as @Jerome suggests...
@Jerome.. Good point. Also sometimes, there is just no relationship at all.
@Martin... Organized religion is finding it tough to get converts even after 2000+ years of struggle. Jon, Stephen, countless others (and me) are a small army, it would take atleast 5000 more years before pie charts vanish... patience and good to have you here 🙂
@Jon .. very well done sir, very well done.
good points every one...
I've got to throw my vote into Jon's camp (which is also Stephen Few's camp) -- bars just tend to work better. One observation about when we say "what people are used to." There are two distinct groups here (depending on the situation, a person can fall in either one): the person who *creates* the chart and the person who *consumes* the chart. Granted, the consumers are "used to" pie charts. But, it's not like a bar chart is something they would struggle to understand or that would require explanation (like sparklines and bullet graphs). Chart consumers are "used to" consuming whatever is put in front of them. Chart creators, on the other hand, may be "used to" creating pie charts, but that isn't an excuse for them to continue to do so -- many people are used to driving without a seatbelt, leaving lights on in their house needlessly, and forwarding not-all-that-funny anecdotes via email. That doesn't mean the practice shouldn't be discouraged!
[...] example that Chandoo used recently is counting uses of words. Clearly, there are other meanings of “bar” (take bar mitzvah or bar none, for [...]
[…] Grouping smaller slices in pie chart […]
Good article. Is it possible to do that with line charts?
Hi,
Is this available in excel 2013?