Polar clock using donut chart [Excel Visualization fun]

Smashing Magazine is one of daily hangouts for new design ideas, inspiration and ogle fun. When they featured Pixel Breaker’s Polar clock last Friday on Top 10 creative ways to display time, I knew this could be an interesting visualization to do in excel. So I have created a donut chart in excel that can show current time. To refresh the clock, just hit f9.

In order to create this I have taken now() and used date time functions to figure out the current day, month, weekday, minutes, hour, seconds day(), weekday(), month(), minute(), hour(), second() respectively and tabulated them like this:

Then the donut chart was created and I have removed the blank portion’s fill color, border and adjusted the other colors.

Of course there are few differences between my chart and that of Pixelbreaker’s (shown aside):

• The chart is not animated, I didnt want to write any VBA, so the chart is not animated and in order to see the animation effect, you have to hold the F9 key
• The labels are outside, well, there is really no way I can put labels inside the donut stripes using excel. So I choose to leave them outside. But there is a problem with that too since with each passing second / minute / hour excel is realigning the labels to somewhere else in the plot area. So I removed the labels permanently and used excel cells directly beneath the chart to show them.

All in all it is a fun experiment in Excel to start another week of awesome tips.

Download the polar clock in excel using donut charts excel sheet and play around.

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