Often it is easy to get carried away with a tools features. Excel is no exception. But here is a list of grotesque charts that you should never make, not even on your last day at work.
1. Leave the radar charts for Spidermen
why?
- You can hardly conclude anything by looking at them
- They need lot of tweaking to make sense
- Visually revolting, even with perfect data points
2. Dont show, just eat your donuts
why?
- This is the evil twin of Pie
- Too many data points and it looks psychedelic
- Very difficult to compare between series
3. Don’t add dimensions to your lines
why?
- It is difficult to compare between series
- Can lead to wrong conclusions
- Often one series overlaps another to cause ambiguity
4. If one Pie is bad, two of them is worst
why?
- They provide very little information
- It is useless to use two pies, when you can tell the story with just one
5. Dont make your charts look like downtown
why?
- Lost information because of overlapping columns
- Difficult to see patterns
- Needs a lot of tweaking to make even the remotest sense
6. Save the unstacked area charts till we have x-ray vision
why?
- It is impossible to understand an unstacked chart in 2d, 3D makes it only worse
- They need lot of tweaking to make some sense
- Visually revolting, even with perfect data points
When in doubt, use a bar
More on charts: 73 beautiful excel chart templates – download free
5 Responses to “Preparing Profit / Loss Pivot Reports [Part 2 of 6]”
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I am not getting sound from the videos. I have checked all the settings and spent several hours searching the Internet to no avail.
Has anyone else had this problem?
Is there anyway to get the Grand Total to be broken out in the same fashion as the items above it? For instance, if you have in column 1, widget a, widget b, and have their sales by month in column 2, I'd like to see the grand total also be by month, for widget a & b combined.
I can't get anything other than a single line for the grand total, rather than the same format as the data above.
Widget A Month Sales
Jan 100
Feb 200
Widget B
Jan 150
Feb 250
Grand total - here I would also like to have Jan, Feb.
Jan 250
Feb 450