Juice Analytics, one of my favorite visualization blogs discussed about creating bubble charts that can depict search term competition among major travel sites in bubble bubble toil and trouble.
Chris, who wrote the article said,
The first tool we tried, simply on principle, was Excel 2003. As expected, making a … quality bubble chart in Excel 2003 is a hard problem. Here’s a draft of how far I got before giving in to label fatigue.
The bubbles themselves aren’t tough, but getting the labels right is hard. I’d love to see a solution, so if any reader wants to tackle it eternal fame can be yours.
Well, not that I would get eternal fame, but I wanted to give it a try, just for fun. Ever since I saw the NY Times Bubble chart on “how many times each political candidate used certain terms”, I have been itching to recreate it somewhere.
Here is the version I could create in Excel 2007

(larger version of the travel site search terms visualization)
How I made this?
- I started with travel patterns data Chris shared
- Then I used Excel formulas OFFSET() and ROW() and COLUMN() to rearrange the data in a tabular format (the original format is a matrix)
- Then I sorted the table on bubble size
- Now I made a bubble chart with 3 data series, one with bubble sizes >50%, one with 25-50% and the rest
- I formatted each series and added labels to the first two series
- Finally made some alignment and bingo
Download the excel file Travel Site Search Patterns – Excel Bubble Chart
(excel 2003 compatible, so you wont exactly see the above image, but one with slightly muffled colors)
How would you have designed the chart ?
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5 Responses to “Number to Words – Excel Formula”
As well as the Indian version, perhaps you could look into an English version as against the American version.
Things diverge after one hundred with one hundred one OR one hundred AND one.
I'm sure that it is always AND after n00 or n00,000 where there any of those zeros have a value. So five hundred thousand and sixteen. There could be two and's seven hundred and eighty-six thousand four hundred and twenty-six.
Chandoo, you are a genius.
Hi Chandoo,
Please take a look at my NumToWords and NumToDollars formulas that I shared here:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel/excel-numtowords-formula/m-p/727433
That is a genius technique Robert. Thanks for posting it here.
100000000 One Hundred FALSE Million
Is there any reason for this error?