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Category: Charts and Graphs

Create a line chart with bands [tutorial]

Here is an interesting scenario.

Imagine you are responsible for customer satisfaction at ACME Inc. Every month you track customer satisfaction rate for the 3 products you sell which are conveniently named Product A, B & C.

You also have bands for the satisfaction rating.

  • Rating of 85% or below is Average
  • Rating between 85% & 95% is OK
  • Rating above 95% is good

At the end of the year, you want to visualize the ratings for last 12 months for 3 products along with bands.

Something like above.

Unfortunately, there is no “Insert Banded line chart” button in Excel. So what to do?

That is what we will learn today. Ready?

CP004: Can I Pie Chart in Public? Discussion about Pie charts, their merits and drawbacks, when to use & when to avoid them

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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In the 4th session of Chandoo.org podcast, lets talk about Pie charts.

Pie charts evoke strong opinions among analysts & managers. Some people love them and can’t have enough of them in reports. Others despise them and go to any lengths to avoid them. And that is why we are going to talk about them in this session.

You will learn,

  • Special, secret transmission from guest stars
  • What is a pie chart?
  • Why they work? 2 reasons
  • Why they don’t work ? 4 reasons
  • Cousins & siblings of Pie charts
    • Donut charts
    • Gauge charts (speedometer)
    • 3D pies
    • Area charts
    • Bubble charts
  • 4 Situations when making a pie chart is ok
  • Alternatives to Pie charts
  • Mistakes you should avoid
  • About the resources
  • Conclusions

I won’t eat donut with a thread inside, but lets make one anyway!

Today lets take a stroll outside what Excel can do and make something fancy, fun and may be useful.

Nowadays, many newspapers, websites and magazines are featuring info-graphics. An info-graphic is a collection of shiny, colorful & data-full charts (or often pieces of text.) In many of these info-graphics, you can see threaded-donut charts. Not sure what that is..? It is not same as the blasphemy of spoiling a soft, sweet, supple donut with a piece of string. No one should be excused for an offense like that.

What I am talking about is shown above

Learn how to create these 11 amazing dashboards

Today lets talk about how to build world-class dashboards.

What is a dashboard?

Dashboard reports allow managers to get high-level overview of the business and help them make quick decisions. A dashboard is usually a one page report that contains critical information for decision support.

How to make dashboards?

Excel is an excellent tool to make powerful dashboards that can provide analysis, insight and alert managers in timely manner. But creating a dashboard takes a lot of skill & practice. That is where a resource like Chandoo.org comes handy. In this site you can find more than 200 different dashboard examples, tutorials, samples and downloads – all designed to make you awesome.

Read on to learn more…

Combine pie and xy scatter charts – World Polls chart revisited

Few days ago, we learned how to create a pie+donut combination chart to visualize polls around the world in 2014. It generated quite a bit of interesting discussion (47 comments so far). One of the comments was from Roberto, who along with Kris & Gábor runs The FrankensTeam an online library of advanced Excel tricks, charts and other mind-boggling spreadsheet wizardry.

I really liked Roberto’s comments on the original post and a charting solution he presented. So I asked him if he can do a guest post explaining the technique to our audience. He obliged and here we go.

Over to FrankensTeam.