This is a guest post by Sohail Anwar.
Why do so many of us use Excel? Let’s trace it back to the ’80s when Microsoft hit gold by being the first out of the blocks with the widely available operating system that was somewhat dummy proof.
Suddenly everyone could aspire to launch ‘Nukes’ like a fresh faced Matthew Broderick in the film ‘War Games’. 
By the early 90’s Windows had become even more established relative to other Operating Systems, so much so that PC manufacturers were developing components around Windows’ capabilities and suddenly PCs were Windows machines. As big business began accepting the significance of computing, Microsoft started winning huge licensing contracts with all the major corporations in all sectors, but the Finance sector in particular, where Excel would be king, was having an exponential boom at this time. For big organisations, once you spent a fortune buying licences for the Operating System it only made sense to purchase the seamlessly integrated and carefully developed/tested apps to run on them; enter Excel, Word, PowerPoint and eventually Outlook. Fast forward to 2015 and we are firmly in the age of second generation corporate professionals who have developed much of their productivity skill sets around those particular Windows tools. While all the excellent tools have their place, Excel stands out and here are 8 reasons why you need to up your Excel game more than ever this year.
1. Excel is a universal language spoken in almost all offices
For those who work in the field of Finance, it’s more common to hear ‘Excel’ than it is to hear ‘Spreadsheet’. Such is the ubiquity of Microsoft’s brilliant application. Of course the purists will tell you 279 reasons Excel is not as good as ‘insert competitor product’ but the reality is 1) Purists aren’t coming from a pragmatic perspective which modern multi-skilled professionals need to be and 2) as mentioned in the intro, like it or lump it, Excel is everywhere!
2. Stop thinking of Excel as a spreadsheet
It is a problem solving tool. I’m not saying it’s not a spreadsheet, accountants and financial analysts will often use it as a traditional spreadsheet but this is just a fraction of what it is capable of. So many other professionals will not correctly harness the awesome power of Excel because they believe it to be nothing but a boring spreadsheet application that deals with boring numbers. Case in point, three of the most common uses of Excel in my work include dealing with Text data, i.e. Lists of people from HR databases that need to be reconciled with other sources, sending out large volumes of tailored emails and creating PowerPoint presentations automatically! Those aren’t the things most people associate a spreadsheet with.
3. Create more time
The most precious commodity on Earth which cannot be replenished is your time. The better you become at leveraging Excel, the more you will be able to achieve. First the speed at which you are able to solve problems will increase and eventually if you get good with VBA then full on automation will save you hours per task. You cannot put a price on the time you will save; it will free up your own time to provide more value in your team, develop yourself in other ways (more skills or attributes), free up time to work on a side business/ hunt for a better, higher paying job or of course you can spend more time trying to break your candy crush high score!
4. Excel is not going anywhere
Excel will be around for a very long time. Big companies cannot easily migrate from established platforms and applications. Case in point, two of the banks I have worked for in the last few years still insist on the archaic 90’s Lotus Notes as their main communication tool! It’s not just the cost of doing so but in the case of Excel in mid to large organisations, Excel is a part of working culture. Even if companies would move, there is no all-encompassing rival, developed and supported by a reputable enough organisation on the horizon, compatible with all the bespoke .NET application development that goes on within organisations (which is designed to integrate with Excel). As a note, the trillion dollar business of Foreign Exchange currency trading as well as most other forms of trading still have most of their analysis work carried out in Excel in almost all financial institutions.
5. Small Data
Big data is so 2014, 2015 is about the rise of small data or local data; it has grown considerably in the last few years as companies have been spending more and more money on CRMs, ERPs, essentially databases. You need to be able to gather data, analyse it, draw some conclusions and present those conclusions as intelligence to decision makers. Don’t get left behind. I have worked with Project Management software like Clarity and most frequently SharePoint (content management)., With the likes of Clarity and other data repositories, you can extract information in formats that Excel likes (.xlsx, .txt & .csv) and then go about getting useful insights and creating reports.
6. Excel is like an analytical sketchpad
Excel is to an analytical professional what paper/pen is to an architect. I have pitched many ideas and models to my bosses by translating my wacky concepts in my head and interpreting those ideas in Excel, especially around finance, budgets and general reporting.
7. Value networking
This is my term for what in my career has turned out to be the best form of networking, not arbitrarily pestering people for coffee meetups but using that time to reach out to someone and make their life a little bit easier. Due to its universal nature, Excel has allowed me to proverbially raise my hand and say ‘I can help with that’. And I did help, helping peers alerted senior colleagues to my abilities and when the senior/Execs started reaching out me for my help, it opened up a whole new set of doors for me which meant good things for my career.
8. More Excel skills make you more marketable
Excel does not represent one skill on your CV, it represents a huge category of skills. In the age of keyword search hiring, you need to understand that simply writing ‘Excel’ or ‘Advanced Excel‘ will seriously undersell you to prospective employers. Use actual Excel functions in your Resume!
Pivot Table, VLOOKUP, Macros, VBA, Conditional Formatting, Charting and filtering…These are far more telling of your ability to an employer then writing Excel. Someone who writes VLOOKUP, Pivot Table, Filtering demonstrates an ability to analyse data and so has eliminated a potential barrier in the mind of the hiring manager reviewing the CV. Simply writing ‘Excel’ on your CV shows you can work with Excel, writing Pivot Table shows you can work with Excel and make it analyse data for you. Excel skills progression correlates well with earnings; the more you improve your Excel skills in a meaningful way to add value in an organisation, the more your earning power goes up.
To give you an example from my own career and many of the colleagues I have worked with and helped over the years: fairly intermediate skills took my earnings from £27k to £40k, getting very good with data analysis took me to £64k, intermediate level VBA took me to the £100k mark, becoming exceptionally good with VBA helped me climb eventually to £140k+. Bear in mind, blindly learning Excel is not something I advise, instead the method for improving is to find opportunities in your work to be more productive. In parallel to improving my Excel skills, I was developing other key attributes too such as Project Management, Reporting expertise and communication. It was exposure to problems in those areas that gave me reasons and opportunity to apply my Excels skills and solve very specific and niche problems which helped me stand out from the crowd more. People think you need to be a VBA god to break the 6 figure mark. When I did it, I was okay but spent a lot of time Googling and making lots of mistakes. When I helped a friend of mine do it she was at best able to manipulate other people’s code, her brilliance was in understanding where appropriate to apply solutions, speeding up and automating is what an employer values, not how pretty your code is.
Conclusion
Is Excel perfect? Maybe not for all scenarios but it’s damn good and for professionals, especially those working in or with mid to large sized organisations and who are (always should be) looking for career development, improving your Excel can go a long way to improving your overall offering as a professional.
Added by Chandoo
Thank you Sohail for echoing my views. I was skeptical to publish this post as it mimics the theme for our podcast session 27 – 15 ways to get awesome in Excel in 2015. But there is no such thing as enough awesomeness. As a community, we are thirsty for more good stuff, all the time. Plus when was the last time you heard both Klingon and Excel in same sentence.
Please share your views about this (not Klingon you silly, about learning Excel) in comments.
About the Author
Sohail Anwar has been hustling and hacking for over a decade in his professional life. He likes to go on about the fact that he’s spent over 10,000 hours applying Excel in the work place and is quite good at it. Download his FREE e-book “20 Ways You Are Preventing Your Salary From Rising” which will benefit professionals who use Excel and feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn
33 Responses to “Show Months & Years in Charts without Cluttering”
Very CooOOOoool 🙂
Would it work if I merely change the display format for the dates, or do they actually need to be retyped in that format (Nov, Dec, etc)?
ps- it's only about 34 donuts per month, or slightly more than 1 per day. Yum!
To make it work automatically when you create a chart, delete the labels above the Year and Month columns, but keep the label above the Y data (Donuts). The blank cells tell Excel that the first row and first two columns (indicated by the blanks) are special, so it uses the first row for series names an the first two columns for X axis labels.
This is better than the other kind of donut chart, but you'll soon be carrying a big donut around your midsection.
First off, thank you Chandoo for being respectful and taking out the "Jesus" comment. Not that I'd threaten to kill you, or start world-wide riots, or make you go into hiding if you didn't (as OTHERS would; wink, wink, nudge, nudge)... I just really appreciate your respectulness and consideration; so thank you. I was meaning to write you about it, but when I came to your site you'd already made the edit... so again, thank you!
Secondly, I wanna say I think there's an easier way to do what you are demonstrating. I've got a pivot chart with months of data and all I had to do was right-click the x axis and then select "format axis", under "Axis Options" there's a check-box that says "Multi-level Category Labels". The chart I was able to do this on was a pivotchart however so maybe it wouldn't be that easy for a non-pivotchart.
Anyway, love the site. Keep up the good work. Thanks also for being so open about your success, it's very encouraging and motivating.
God (aka Jesus) Bless. 🙂
Hi Chandoo - great site! Another option to save space is to simply rotate the orientation of the text by 90 degrees, so the dates read vertical rather than horizontal. However, I like the elegance of your solution also.
Hey Chandoo -- Great tip. Only yesterday I was working through some strange behaviour with formatting dates in PivotCharts. Seems the axes never want to cooperate. This is a neat and elegant solution I hadn't thought of using. May need to abandon pivotcharts to use formulas like that, but if we use dynamic named ranges, no big sacrifice.
BTW, whatever did you do to get your site blocked in China? Never heard of regime change by a grass-root spreadsheet movement. Maybe your ISP is hosting some problem sites. Chandoo.org is certainly worth it for me to fire up the VPN, but I'm sure you would lose a lot of other visitors from the middle kingdom.
Chandoo ... pls help.. the link is blocked over here... pls can you put the regular link... 🙂
@JP... Excel Axis formatting is linked to cell formatting by default. So you can just have the dates which are formatted to look like months (mmm).
@Erin: It was not my intention to mock anyone's faith or religion. I just used the word as it is quite common. I decided to remove it as I got 2 emails from readers requesting for the same.
Also, the pivot charts take pivot table groupings by default, so you need not do any of the above while making charts from pivot tables.
@Kein: I am not sure why Chinese authorities decided to block my site. I wish they would actually look at the content instead of blocking sites based on simple text matching rules.
@Kapil: The file is mirrored here: http://chandoo.org/img/d/date-axis-months-years-trick.xls
Cool, really cool...
Nice one Chandoo,
Also would like to mention abt useful method while creating dynamic charts.
In any chart where in the months keep on adding - instead of changing the range for the chart every time we add a month, we can actually format the months as dates (probably 1st of every month) still keep the format as "mmm" AND while selecting the data, we can select a huge rows (date column) once and for all, and the chart adjusts automatically with the data that we entered. So next month when I enter Dec's data, I need not change the source data of the chart, however it automatically adjusts.
Hope I made sense.!
Regards,
SS
Thanks, Chandoo! This is a great tip - one that I will definitely put to use. I typically have an axis with mmm yy format, aligned vertically, but this will definitely look a bit cleaner (except in cases where the chart is too small for the axis labels to be displayed horizontally, even without the mmm yy on one line). Thanks again!
Tom
Chandoo,
Thank you for the posts you are very diligent not to mention very helpful. I would like to know how to get the separation lines on the axis? For example your candy sales chart has longer lines separating east and west how do you format that?
Thanks for being very awesome!
-Josh
Hi Chandoo, we can look the formulas because there is a message:"Unsupported features".
Could you send a diferent Link ?
Thanks.
@SS But what if you've got formulas in the data block (i.e where you would enter static data for the month of december)? My chart now shows #N/A #N/A in the axis with no data for all future dates.
Chandoo, I've got a dynamic range set up showing #N/A errors for future dates. The MMM-DD date format format in row works fine, but when I use YYYY and MMM in two rows, the axis shows #N/A #N/A for all future dates with no data. How would you go about keeping those future months hidden?
Matt -
In order for the axis to automatically extend to the dates within the range and ignore #N/A at the end, you need a date-scale axis, and for this you need to use one column with the complete date, not two columns with year and month.
If you want to use two columns, you need to generate Names in the worksheet which define ranges only as long as the number of months. I have a review of dynamic chart approaches in http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/dynamic-chart-review/ and a whole category on my blog at http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/category/dynamic-charts/. Chandoo also has examples of his own on this site.
How do you make a dynamic chart out of this?
I can't get the axis labels range right.
I tried something like this:
=OFFSET(REPORT!$H$10:$I$10;0;0;COUNTA(REPORT!$H$10:$I$100);1)
Any idea?
Ethan -
Your offset formula defines a range 1 row in size, but the technique here requires 2 rows. Your definition should end with
;2)
instead of
;1)
Thanks Jon,
Got it working now
Great! Now, is there any way to do this directly in Powerpoint? I don't like having linked excel files, so I create the graphs right inside Powerpoint, any way to do this there? I tried and was unsuccessful.
Thanks.
Cool tip Chandoo......thanks
[...] extract year and month from dates to avoid a mess in our stock chart. Chandoo has a great post: Show Months & Years in Charts without ClutteringIn cell B2:=YEAR(D2)In cell B3:=IF(YEAR(D3)=YEAR(D2), "", YEAR(D3))Cell C2:=IF(TEXT(D2, [...]
Hi there,
I have got a data ranging for 3 years. I want to show a chart which shows Jan of 2011, 2012 and 2013 together side by side; then Feb11, Feb12 and Feb13 side by side, then Mar11, Mar12 and Mar13, and so on until December.
Please help. Thanks.
@Bilal
Do you want a number of charts next to each other as separate charts or the data next to each other in a single chart?
What type of chart were you thinking about?
Can you post your data for us to review?
Refer upload instructions at: http://chandoo.org/forum/threads/posting-a-sample-workbook.451/
Hi there
Very good solution this. I have another question on it, though. How do you format the X-axis with monthly gaps (ie, with labels "Jan 2012", "Apr", "Jul", "Oct", "Jan 2013", "Mar", etc), when you're dealing with a data series with weekly or daily data points? The Axis Options dialogue box doesn't appear to offer "Date axis" as an option under the "Axis Type" section.
I've managed to do it in one case with weekly data by setting the interval between tick marks at 13 -- the approximate number of weeks in a quarter -- to get 3-month intervals. But this wouldn't work if I wanted to show 1-month intervals, or had a more detailed daily data series to work with.
Any luck getting the dates to work on a scatter graph? I'm only getting numbers. Works fine on line graphs though.
How can we do the vice versa? i.e. on the x-axis showing year on the level 1, and months on level 2.
I wanted to build these kind of axis labels for 5 years, with year on top and months at the bottom, but it should form in such a way that the seperating lines should seperate the entire data set only at December of each year, and no lines in between any month.
@Apoorve
Just re-arrange the columns
You need to put a space in all cells where you don't want a year
See the attached file
http://chandoo.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Chart-for-Apoorve.xlsx
Unfortunately you don't get any control over lines its all or nothing.
Hello - the link seems to be broken:
http://cid-b663e096d6c08c74.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/date-axis-months-years-trick.xls
Regards.
Like!!
Three times already today I have used this website and saved a ton of work time in researching excel tricks.
Suggestion: Why not have a "like" or "this article was useful to me" button. That way you can see what is most useful by your users and maybe generate more content based on those "likes".
Just saying. Thanks again and you're doing a great job!
Thanks for the tip. However, I couldn't download your file. The link is broken.
Thank You for taking the time to post this tip. I hope that you have a blessed day.
The link does not work properly and I'm not sure how to actually get the graph to display like this, its frustrating me a tonne. I cant work out what to google either to find an answer elsewhere! 🙁
Is this possible with waterfall chart. Data hereunder -
Years Abbrevation Amt
2020 BEG 2,006
REV 1,950
EMP 1,058
DM (3,244)
OOE 1,078
OPMT 182
AB (638)
END 2,392
2021 REV 8,534
EMP 67
DM (2,142)
OOE (3,120)
OPMT 510
AB 1,008
END 7,249