Anyone running a small business knows the oozing bits of joy when you hear a customer saying, “Can you send me an invoice?”
While creating an invoice is an easy task, if you want something that is professional looking, easy to manage and works well, then you are stuck.
That is where Excel really shines. By using an invoice template, you can quickly create and send invoices.
Today I want to share one such template with you all. Why? Because we are awesome like that.
Free Invoice Template – Download
Click here to download the template.
The file contains 2 sheets.
- A ready to use or print invoice template. Just fill in values and bingo!
- A table where you can list all your products and services. This way you can select them on the invoice to generate prices quickly, as shown below:
How to use this invoice template?
This template is optimized to print or save as PDF. All you have to do is enter the data and go.
- Go to Products & Services tab and specify your details
- Select items & specify quantities to see prices
- Apply any discount per line item as needed
- Delete extra lines or add lines as needed
- Specify tax % if any
- Provide payment instructions
- Add other details like invoice #, receivers details and your details
- Print this sheet (only invoice will be printed)
OR
Save this worksheet as PDF (only invoice will be saved)
How is this template made?
As a curious reader, you may want to know what Excel techniques are involved in constructing this template. So here we go,
- Tables: to keep the products & services data
- Data validation: to select one of the products from list
- Conditional formatting
- to prevent duplicate product names in the invoice
- to show zebra lines (alternative rows in different color) in the invoice items list
- to show $ amounts only if quantity & product name is specified
- VLOOKUP formula to fetch price of selected item
- IFERROR formula to suppress any errors
- Print areas: to print (or save as PDF) only the invoice portion
Do you use Excel for preparing invoices?
Just like millions of small businesses around the world, we at chandoo.org too use Excel for making invoices, quotations and tracking data.
What about you? Do you use Excel templates to manage invoices, quotations etc.? What is your experience like? Please share your thoughts & techniques in the comments.
More Excel templates for you
Check out these templates to save precious time and kick some serious ass.
14 Responses to “Group Smaller Slices in Pie Charts to Improve Readability”
I think the virtue of pie charts is precisely that they are difficult to decode. In many contexts, you have to release information but you don't want the relationship between values to jump at your reader. That's when pie charts are most useful.
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Chandoo,
millions of ants cannot be mistaken.....There should be a reason why everybody continues using Pie charts, despite what gurus like you or Jon and others say.
one reason could be because we are just used to, so that's what we need to change, the "comfort zone"...
i absolutely agree, since I've been "converted", I just find out that bar charts are clearer, and nicer to the view...
Regards,
Martin
[...] says we can Group Smaller Slices in Pie Charts to Improve Readability. Such a pie has too many labels to fit into a tight space, so you need ro move the labels around [...]
Chandoo -
You ask "Can I use an alternative to pie chart?"
I answer in You Say “Pie”, I Say “Bar”.
This visualization was created because it was easy to print before computers. In this day and age, it should not exist.
I think the 100% Bar Chart is just as useless/unreadable as Pies - we should rename them something like Mama's Strudel Charts - how big a slice would you like, Dear?
My money's with Jon on this topic.
The primary function of any pie chart with more than 2 or 3 data points is to obfuscate. But maybe that is the main purpose, as @Jerome suggests...
@Jerome.. Good point. Also sometimes, there is just no relationship at all.
@Martin... Organized religion is finding it tough to get converts even after 2000+ years of struggle. Jon, Stephen, countless others (and me) are a small army, it would take atleast 5000 more years before pie charts vanish... patience and good to have you here 🙂
@Jon .. very well done sir, very well done.
good points every one...
I've got to throw my vote into Jon's camp (which is also Stephen Few's camp) -- bars just tend to work better. One observation about when we say "what people are used to." There are two distinct groups here (depending on the situation, a person can fall in either one): the person who *creates* the chart and the person who *consumes* the chart. Granted, the consumers are "used to" pie charts. But, it's not like a bar chart is something they would struggle to understand or that would require explanation (like sparklines and bullet graphs). Chart consumers are "used to" consuming whatever is put in front of them. Chart creators, on the other hand, may be "used to" creating pie charts, but that isn't an excuse for them to continue to do so -- many people are used to driving without a seatbelt, leaving lights on in their house needlessly, and forwarding not-all-that-funny anecdotes via email. That doesn't mean the practice shouldn't be discouraged!
[...] example that Chandoo used recently is counting uses of words. Clearly, there are other meanings of “bar” (take bar mitzvah or bar none, for [...]
[…] Grouping smaller slices in pie chart […]
Good article. Is it possible to do that with line charts?
Hi,
Is this available in excel 2013?