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.
More on Clocks: Give your timeseries data a twist, plot around clock
More on Visualization fun: Tag clouds in excel using VBA, Square Pies in Excel, not everything is round
, Olympic Medals on a map
11 Responses to “Fix Incorrect Percentages with this Paste-Special Trick”
I've just taught yesterday to a colleague of mine how to convert amounts in local currency into another by pasting special the ROE.
great thing to know !!!
Chandoo - this is such a great trick and helps save time. If you don't use this shortcut, you have to take can create a formula where =(ref cell /100), copy that all the way down, covert it to a percentage and then copy/paste values to the original column. This does it all much faster. Nice job!
I was just asking peers yesterday if anyone know if an easy way to do this, I've been editing each cell and adding a % manually vs setting the cell to Percentage for months and just finally reached my wits end. What perfect timing! Thanks, great tip!
If it's just appearance you care about, another alternative is to use this custom number format:
0"%"
By adding the percent sign in quotes, it gets treated as text and won't do what you warned about here: "You can not just format the cells to % format either, excel shows 23 as 2300% then."
Dear Jon S. You are the reason I love the internet. 3 year old comments making my life easier.
Thank you.
Here is a quicker protocol.
Enter 10000% into the extra cell, copy this cell, select the range you need to convert to percentages, and use paste special > divide. Since the Paste > All option is selected, it not only divides by 10000% (i.e. 100), it also applies the % format to the cells being pasted on.
@Martin: That is another very good use of Divide / Multiply operations.
@Tony, @Jody: Thank you 🙂
@Jon S: Good one...
@Jon... now why didnt I think of that.. Excellent
Thank You so much. it is really helped me.
Big help...Thanks
Thanks. That really saved me a lot of time!
Is Show Formulas is turned on in the Formula Ribbon, it will stay in decimal form until that is turned off. Drove me batty for an hour until I just figured it out.