Smashing Magazine is one of daily hangouts for new design ideas, inspiration and ogle fun. When they featured Pixel Breaker’s Polar clock last Friday on Top 10 creative ways to display time, I knew this could be an interesting visualization to do in excel. So I have created a donut chart in excel that can show current time. To refresh the clock, just hit f9.

In order to create this I have taken now() and used date time functions to figure out the current day, month, weekday, minutes, hour, seconds day(), weekday(), month(), minute(), hour(), second() respectively and tabulated them like this:
Then the donut chart was created and I have removed the blank portion’s fill color, border and adjusted the other colors.
Of course there are few differences between my chart and that of Pixelbreaker’s (shown aside):
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- The chart is not animated, I didnt want to write any VBA, so the chart is not animated and in order to see the animation effect, you have to hold the F9 key
- The labels are outside, well, there is really no way I can put labels inside the donut stripes using excel. So I choose to leave them outside. But there is a problem with that too since with each passing second / minute / hour excel is realigning the labels to somewhere else in the plot area. So I removed the labels permanently and used excel cells directly beneath the chart to show them.
All in all it is a fun experiment in Excel to start another week of awesome tips.
Download the polar clock in excel using donut charts excel sheet and play around.
More on Clocks: Give your timeseries data a twist, plot around clock
More on Visualization fun: Tag clouds in excel using VBA, Square Pies in Excel, not everything is round
, Olympic Medals on a map

















7 Responses to “CP014: How to create awesome dashboards – 10 step process for you”
Very interested in topic unfortunately I get no sound when I play it.
Where can I get add ins for excel 2007
#Budala
Try using Google to search for Excel Addin
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@Andy
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Hello Chandoo,
i am one of the great fan of your. i am one MIS executive in realstate company.And i try make dash board for CRM(Client Relation Management) Dept formance and anlysis process.Its get created not so effective according to can u suggest me .what i hve to give or take for makeing it for effective and attractive?.
regards,
Shashak verma
Hi,
I want to create an interactive dashboard in excel (Google Drive) which should have multiple data along with beautiful charts..
I handle two teams in IT Tech support so were preparing 2 different dashboards.. however need to club and want to create single report, can anyone help something like