Hey there, I have a SUPER exciting announcement! April is about to get a whole lot sweeter with our Power BI Dashboard Contest! Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Craft the most EPIC dashboard for the Awesome Chocolates CEO with sales & financial insights! Winners stand a chance to score up to $500 in Amazon Gift Cards, plus some serious bragging rights!
Contest Rules and Information
- Participants must use Power BI (any recent version) to create the dashboard.
- The dashboard should be built with native visuals only. No add-ons or marketplace visuals or Python/R visuals.
- The dashboard should contain a readme / help tab to explain the features and methodology.
- Your dashboard should feature the Awesome Chocolates logo, contest title on it. These assets are included in the dataset file below.
- Limit your dashboard to one Power BI Page (readme / help goes on a separate page)
- You are free to combine the business data of Awesome Chocolates with any publicly available datasets. Credit any sources in the readme / help tab.
- The participant agrees to allow indefinite copyright and sharing of the workbooks (and any extra datasets) with chandoo.org for further publication, remixing, and usage.
- Your dashboard should be submitted by 30th of April 2024 using the upload instructions (to be added later).
- Participants agree to have their name and any social media handles listed on the contest website.
- Only one entry per participant. But your dashboard PBIX may contain more than one page with different versions of the dashboard.
How to participate:
I have set up an exclusive community on Microsoft Teams to run & manage this contest. To participate, please follow the below-instructions.
- You need a personal email address (such as @gmail.com or @hotmail.com) or your phone number.
- Go to my Dashboard Champions Circle on Microsoft Teams
- Use your personal email address or phone number to register. You will need to switch to “personal” mode of teams if prompted.
- Join the community and find the dataset & dashboard purpose information inside.
- Start building your dashboard.
- Submit your entry by 30th April using the instructions in the community.
Contest Dataset & Dashboard Purpose:
Please download the Awesome Chocolates Dataset using the link inside the teams community.
The purpose of the dashboard is to inform the CEO of Awesome Chocolates about the performance of our business in the last 13 months. The dataset contains daily shipment data from 2023 February to 2024 February. Here are a few things our CEO is interested in, but she likes surprises too. So get creative.
- How sales, units, shipments, profit, profit%, low-box shipments (shipments with box count under 50) trends are looking
- A detailed performance understanding at product or salesperson level
- Interesting patterns in product / geography data
- Ability to drill down to details if needed.
You are encouraged to use various powerful interactive features of Power BI like tooltips, bookmarks, DAX, conditional formatting, pictures and anything else you might fancy. Again, get creative and showcase what you can build, but stick to one standard sized Power BI page.
When is the deadline?
You should submit your Power BI dashboard by 30th of April, 2024 (end of day, pacific time).
Remember, only one dashboard per person.
How to submit my entry?
Please submit your dashboard using the instructions inside my exclusive teams community.
For more information and guidelines, visit the Awesome Dashboard community page.
About the prizes and winner selection:
The total prize money for this competition is $500.
- First prize: $250 Amazon Gift Card
- Second prize: $150 Amazon Gift Card
- Third prize: $100 Amazon Gift Card
- Don’t forget the bragging rights!
A panel of Power BI experts and dashboard pros will select the winners. I will share the details later on the teams community.
All the best 🙂
Note: This competition is powered by Microsoft Teams
12 Responses to “Speeding up & Optimizing Excel – Tips for Charting & Formatting [Speedy Spreadsheet Week]”
Usually when I dump data into my files to update values, the formatting sometimes go to all rows or columns. So what I typically will do is go to the last row and then the last column and use Ctrl + Shift + end and then delete the cells highlighted. this will remove all unknown formats in the worksheet. Also, after you have done this, you won't see the benefit until you save the document. Sometimes I even have to close and reopen. The direct sign that this has improved is the size of the scroll bar and range.
I have some comments on a couple of the points.
1. Camera objects
Tip: I use defined names in conjunction with camera tool objects.
Each camera object gets a name like so:
CameraItem01
Referring to: =IF(PicsOn=1,Sheet1!$C$2:$S$5,"")
By setting the PicsOn name to 1, the camera objects become "live", by setting the PicsOn name to 0, they become static. That improves performance enormously.
4: Conditional formatting
Lots of CF rules can slow down your workbook a lot. And it does not show the calc progress a "normal" recalc does on slow workbooks.
5. Format whole columns/rows
as far as I know, there is no problem with formatting entire columns/rows performance-wise, on the contrary, Excel is more efficient when you format an entire column than when you format a couple of 100 rows of a column.
6. Styles.
Here I wholeheartedly disagree. I say: Use styles. And use them religously.
I mean: if you have applied a (custom) style and you need to change a small piece of formatting to make that one cell look right, force yourself to create a new style just for that cell. It forces you to really think about your spreadsheet design and try and streamline it. It also makes it much, much easier to change your sheet's appearance later on. See http://www.jkp-ads.com/articles/styles00.asp
Very good insights Jan..
Camera objects: I often use similar technique to turn off images in my dashboards.
Formats: Thanks for clearing this. Do you think formatting larger ranges has any impact on macro speeds or it does not matter?
Styles: Thanks for telling us about this. As I mentioned, I am not sure about the styles, but I am under the impressions that excessive use of styles can bloat the file size.
@Chandoo:
If you stick to formatting entire rows/columns I don't expect macro speed is affected. Better: try it!
If you use styles properly AND as a replacement of ad-hoc cell formatting, I expect you'll see that the file actually is smaller in size.
This is because the cells now only have a reference to a single style instead of a reference to a custom cell formatting style.
Many cell formatting combinations get created if you format your cells in an ad-hoc manner, which was responsible for the dreaded "Too many different cell formats" error in Excel 2003 and older. Excel 2007 and 2010 have a higher limit there, but it does slow down your file with many of them.
Style bloat in my point of view is what you get by copying and pasting a lot from various other files and thus get Normal 1, Normal 1 1, Normal 1 1 1, ... I have seen workbooks with as many as 6000 styles, all caused by copying and pasting from various differently formatted workbooks.
Excel 2007 and 2010 have fixed a number of issues regarding copying of styles, but for workbooks with a long editing history, the trouble is already in the workbooks.
Cant emphasise the importance of reducing the amount of formatting in a workbook - this has a suprising impact on workbook size. I've always kept to one font, and no more than three colours - this has worked well for me. Keeping things clean and simple should be the motto when designing any type of report/dashboard that is going to be distributed around the organisation.
You can also save a few MB's by saving as an xlsb file.
Has anyone else mentioned that only the first item in the "more ..." section is hyperlinked.
Prem, have you confirmed by trial that XLSB file size is smaller than same XLSX file? Sorry, I just tried it with a small, simple XLSM file. I was surprised to see you are correct. File went from 40kb to 37kb. I thought that the compression of the new file would make the new file smaller.
@Ron
All Excel files have a minimum overhead that they have to include which is around 8KB, just to store a simple number or letter.
So with a small file of 40KB you will not see a huge improvement in file size
With files greater than 10MB you will see large improvements in size.
The compression gained also depends on what the contents of the file include. That is straight numbers, text and formulas can be greatly compressed whereas files that contain a lot of objects especially pictures gain very little from using *.xlsb files.
@Ron.. the other articles are yet to be published. All the links will be updated by Tuesday (27th March).
Hi,
I have a need for x,y scatter chart to have arround 30 data series.
like this:
http://i65.tinypic.com/jra8lc.jpg
Also I have multiple of such charts in one excel file.
Is there any way to make excel faster, because it is irritatingly slow?
(though my PC config. is quite on the level)
Thanks in advance!!!
@Mil
30 series won't be the issue
It is the number of points in the series
Also remove all fancy modifications, like shadows, fancy fills etc
I'd suggest asking the question in the Chandoo.org Forums http://forum.chandoo.org/
Attach a sample file with an example of what you are after
@Hui
I've already removed all fancy mod. The problem is there are also a lot of data points in one series.
Thanks for the advice!
@Mil
Do you really need every data point ?
Where is the chart being presented Screen or Report
On a screen you are unlikely to use more than 800 pixels for the chart area
So using any more than about 250 points is not adding values
On an A4 chart in landscape lets say the chart area is 6" long and at 300dpi that is 2000 pixels
Once again using more than 800-1000 points will not add any value
I have seen charts with 30,000+ points and when this is explained and a work around shown people appreciate the speed up
For a work around try setting up an area where you select say every x'th point using an Offset or Index Function
Then plot that data
I'd suggest asking the question in the Chandoo.org Forums http://forum.chandoo.org/
Attach a sample file with an example of what you are after