Last week, we learned how to visualize Suicides vs. Murders data using Interactive charts in Excel.
William, one of our readers, took this technique and applied it to Stocks. He emailed me because he has some formula issues with the stock data. Once I solved the problem, I asked him, “Can I share this with our readers?” and he is too happy to agree. So here we go.
Interactive Analysis of Stocks using Excel

(Data as of 20SEP2011, 4PM EDT, from Yahoo Finance)
How does this Work?
This workbook is just a clone of Suicides vs. Murders visualization with different data. The only change is that, here we used LARGE and MATCH formulas instead of COUNTIF formula to sort the list.
Learn more about this technique is from KPI Dashboard Sorting article.
Download Stock Performance Analysis Workbook
Click here to download the workbook & play with it. Just change the data & formulas in “Share Data” worksheet to modify this.
Do you Like This?
I really liked how William put this together. It is simple and yet, quite powerful.
What about you? Do you like this technique? Are you planning to use it anywhere? Please share your ideas using comments.

















3 Responses to “CP049: Don’t do data dumps!!!”
Your title got me nervous because I'm all about data dumps, but not for attaching graphics to data dumps. My reason for using data dumps is when someone is trying to do analysis and their starting point is a report that's formatted in a way for a human to read. I instruct them to stop with the report and go get a data dump: just rows and columns and rows and columns.
Agreed, nearly all of my reports start with 100+ lines of simple table data.
That way you can build your functionality around pulling information from that tabled information.
Yes yes!