This is a guest post by Sohail Anwar.
Why do so many of us use Excel? Let’s trace it back to the ’80s when Microsoft hit gold by being the first out of the blocks with the widely available operating system that was somewhat dummy proof.
Suddenly everyone could aspire to launch ‘Nukes’ like a fresh faced Matthew Broderick in the film ‘War Games’. 
By the early 90’s Windows had become even more established relative to other Operating Systems, so much so that PC manufacturers were developing components around Windows’ capabilities and suddenly PCs were Windows machines. As big business began accepting the significance of computing, Microsoft started winning huge licensing contracts with all the major corporations in all sectors, but the Finance sector in particular, where Excel would be king, was having an exponential boom at this time. For big organisations, once you spent a fortune buying licences for the Operating System it only made sense to purchase the seamlessly integrated and carefully developed/tested apps to run on them; enter Excel, Word, PowerPoint and eventually Outlook. Fast forward to 2015 and we are firmly in the age of second generation corporate professionals who have developed much of their productivity skill sets around those particular Windows tools. While all the excellent tools have their place, Excel stands out and here are 8 reasons why you need to up your Excel game more than ever this year.
1. Excel is a universal language spoken in almost all offices
For those who work in the field of Finance, it’s more common to hear ‘Excel’ than it is to hear ‘Spreadsheet’. Such is the ubiquity of Microsoft’s brilliant application. Of course the purists will tell you 279 reasons Excel is not as good as ‘insert competitor product’ but the reality is 1) Purists aren’t coming from a pragmatic perspective which modern multi-skilled professionals need to be and 2) as mentioned in the intro, like it or lump it, Excel is everywhere!
2. Stop thinking of Excel as a spreadsheet
It is a problem solving tool. I’m not saying it’s not a spreadsheet, accountants and financial analysts will often use it as a traditional spreadsheet but this is just a fraction of what it is capable of. So many other professionals will not correctly harness the awesome power of Excel because they believe it to be nothing but a boring spreadsheet application that deals with boring numbers. Case in point, three of the most common uses of Excel in my work include dealing with Text data, i.e. Lists of people from HR databases that need to be reconciled with other sources, sending out large volumes of tailored emails and creating PowerPoint presentations automatically! Those aren’t the things most people associate a spreadsheet with.
3. Create more time
The most precious commodity on Earth which cannot be replenished is your time. The better you become at leveraging Excel, the more you will be able to achieve. First the speed at which you are able to solve problems will increase and eventually if you get good with VBA then full on automation will save you hours per task. You cannot put a price on the time you will save; it will free up your own time to provide more value in your team, develop yourself in other ways (more skills or attributes), free up time to work on a side business/ hunt for a better, higher paying job or of course you can spend more time trying to break your candy crush high score!
4. Excel is not going anywhere
Excel will be around for a very long time. Big companies cannot easily migrate from established platforms and applications. Case in point, two of the banks I have worked for in the last few years still insist on the archaic 90’s Lotus Notes as their main communication tool! It’s not just the cost of doing so but in the case of Excel in mid to large organisations, Excel is a part of working culture. Even if companies would move, there is no all-encompassing rival, developed and supported by a reputable enough organisation on the horizon, compatible with all the bespoke .NET application development that goes on within organisations (which is designed to integrate with Excel). As a note, the trillion dollar business of Foreign Exchange currency trading as well as most other forms of trading still have most of their analysis work carried out in Excel in almost all financial institutions.
5. Small Data
Big data is so 2014, 2015 is about the rise of small data or local data; it has grown considerably in the last few years as companies have been spending more and more money on CRMs, ERPs, essentially databases. You need to be able to gather data, analyse it, draw some conclusions and present those conclusions as intelligence to decision makers. Don’t get left behind. I have worked with Project Management software like Clarity and most frequently SharePoint (content management)., With the likes of Clarity and other data repositories, you can extract information in formats that Excel likes (.xlsx, .txt & .csv) and then go about getting useful insights and creating reports.
6. Excel is like an analytical sketchpad
Excel is to an analytical professional what paper/pen is to an architect. I have pitched many ideas and models to my bosses by translating my wacky concepts in my head and interpreting those ideas in Excel, especially around finance, budgets and general reporting.
7. Value networking
This is my term for what in my career has turned out to be the best form of networking, not arbitrarily pestering people for coffee meetups but using that time to reach out to someone and make their life a little bit easier. Due to its universal nature, Excel has allowed me to proverbially raise my hand and say ‘I can help with that’. And I did help, helping peers alerted senior colleagues to my abilities and when the senior/Execs started reaching out me for my help, it opened up a whole new set of doors for me which meant good things for my career.
8. More Excel skills make you more marketable
Excel does not represent one skill on your CV, it represents a huge category of skills. In the age of keyword search hiring, you need to understand that simply writing ‘Excel’ or ‘Advanced Excel‘ will seriously undersell you to prospective employers. Use actual Excel functions in your Resume!
Pivot Table, VLOOKUP, Macros, VBA, Conditional Formatting, Charting and filtering…These are far more telling of your ability to an employer then writing Excel. Someone who writes VLOOKUP, Pivot Table, Filtering demonstrates an ability to analyse data and so has eliminated a potential barrier in the mind of the hiring manager reviewing the CV. Simply writing ‘Excel’ on your CV shows you can work with Excel, writing Pivot Table shows you can work with Excel and make it analyse data for you. Excel skills progression correlates well with earnings; the more you improve your Excel skills in a meaningful way to add value in an organisation, the more your earning power goes up.
To give you an example from my own career and many of the colleagues I have worked with and helped over the years: fairly intermediate skills took my earnings from £27k to £40k, getting very good with data analysis took me to £64k, intermediate level VBA took me to the £100k mark, becoming exceptionally good with VBA helped me climb eventually to £140k+. Bear in mind, blindly learning Excel is not something I advise, instead the method for improving is to find opportunities in your work to be more productive. In parallel to improving my Excel skills, I was developing other key attributes too such as Project Management, Reporting expertise and communication. It was exposure to problems in those areas that gave me reasons and opportunity to apply my Excels skills and solve very specific and niche problems which helped me stand out from the crowd more. People think you need to be a VBA god to break the 6 figure mark. When I did it, I was okay but spent a lot of time Googling and making lots of mistakes. When I helped a friend of mine do it she was at best able to manipulate other people’s code, her brilliance was in understanding where appropriate to apply solutions, speeding up and automating is what an employer values, not how pretty your code is.
Conclusion
Is Excel perfect? Maybe not for all scenarios but it’s damn good and for professionals, especially those working in or with mid to large sized organisations and who are (always should be) looking for career development, improving your Excel can go a long way to improving your overall offering as a professional.
Added by Chandoo
Thank you Sohail for echoing my views. I was skeptical to publish this post as it mimics the theme for our podcast session 27 – 15 ways to get awesome in Excel in 2015. But there is no such thing as enough awesomeness. As a community, we are thirsty for more good stuff, all the time. Plus when was the last time you heard both Klingon and Excel in same sentence.
Please share your views about this (not Klingon you silly, about learning Excel) in comments.
About the Author
Sohail Anwar has been hustling and hacking for over a decade in his professional life. He likes to go on about the fact that he’s spent over 10,000 hours applying Excel in the work place and is quite good at it. Download his FREE e-book “20 Ways You Are Preventing Your Salary From Rising” which will benefit professionals who use Excel and feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn
39 Responses to “Some charts try to make you an April fool all the time (or why 3d pie charts are evil)”
Another little trick they've used in that pie chart is in the positioning of the car sales in relation to each other. The way in which you present them in the column chart is from highest seller to lowest seller, left to right, which is what we're used to seeing. But in the dastardly pie chart, the two smallest selling cars (the SX4 and the Scala) are placed one either side of the Verna, which serves to make it look bigger again.
Also the perspective at which you look at the pie chart makes the Verna look bigger. From my experimintation, a perspective of around 35-37 degrees makes it look like an even bigger slice, which appears to be what the advertiser has done.
All of this manipulation would make you think of the "photoshopping" or "air-brushing" that is done on photos of models, film stars, and so on, in magazines, to give them the unattainable looks, skin, shape, etc., etc., that many aspire to, but can never reach.
This post is quite the learning experience, thanks very much.
please help!!!! im taking a computer class at SPC in clearwater. i have an excel worksheet to turn in and my pie charts are just blank no pie at all, all the other charts are working but i need #D pie chart can anyone help me to restore the 3D Pie chart??? Emergency
@Amanda
Select the Chart
Right Click it
Change Chart Type
Select a 3D Pie chart type
This is a great example of why I do not like pie charts.
I promise to never make a 3d pie chart. If I ever see one, I promise to not rotate or explode it. I also promise to create alternative charts (usually column, bar, line or scatter plots) so that my audience can see the truth better.
And oh yeah, I promise to bake & eat pies whenever possible. Apart from cakes, pastries, ice creams, biscuits and other assorted fun foods that is.
signed David Onder
Reminds me of the quote ... statistics are like bikinis ... what they reveal is suggestive, what they conceal is vital.
I love that Quote and you are so right, now to get the upper management to understand that!!!
Oh .. and wont it be awesome if u can create a quick decision tree tool for jo so that she can buy shoes :p ... perhaps link it to jabong.com or flipkart.com account and boom ... a spreadsheet shopping tool!
There are a only two acceptable pie charts: actual pie and cheesecake.
My own commitment to the truth is to incorporate pereto graphs (Few, 2006) into most of my bar/column graphs. The pereto is activated by a non-printing check box form control. This method has proven its worth on a number of occasions when presenting data and demonstrating its integrity when challenged - Also gets a kudos point from the boss for foresight, preparedness and professionalism :-).
Leonk
Hi Leon,
Can you elaborate? I'm aware of pareto as the 80/20 rule what do you mean by you "include" it?
@JungleJme
A Pareto Chart is a Ranked Column chart
With the column of the highest Rank occurring at the left and the Smallest column at the right
It highlights the issues with most impact easily
Have a read of: http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/09/02/pareto-charts/
A little part of me dies inside whenever I see presentations from upper level technical management that includes exploded 3D pie charts.
I promise to never make a 3d pie chart. If I ever see one, I promise to not rotate or explode it. I also promise to create alternative charts (usually column, bar, line or scatter plots) so that my audience can see the truth better.And oh yeah, I promise to bake & eat pies whenever possible. Apart from cakes, pastries, ice creams, biscuits and other assorted fun foods that is.signed Luke M
So if the goal is to mislead, 3-D pie charts are great. There is a use for everything.
Definitely agree with you. They did the appropriate thing as a marketing scheme. The chart is not "wrong" in any way, just misleading to the eye.
I think it's an excellent ploy.
I think these are an excellent display of the versatility of storytelling that is allowed by the champion of charts, the pie. Great work Chandoo. See my site for some further examples of effectively working with pie charts. eagerpies.com
Well done Chandoo, all points clearly made; I'd add that there are lies, damned lies, statistics, pie charts and tweaked pie charts.
I never recommend a pie chart but some of my custoners are so stupi are sure their requirements are correct. And the customer is always right (when he is the boss). So no pledge but lots of support.
When I teach charts I ask what is the purpose of charts? Fairly sharp students talk about information over data. The purpose is to make better decisions happen. The accuracy is essential, the usability is essential, but the real gain is when the manager sees what to do to make the figures better.
Why do you have strikethru option in replies that is visble when editing but lost when posted? Of course is this does show a strikethru I must have got it wrong; let's see..
... no thought not. Register aplea for strikethru to work. Thanks
Hand on experience, thank you for sharing this.
My favourite (if that's the right word) is Stve Jobs at
http://www.myspace.com/crazyalaskandude/photos/30206354
Some people must be assumed to know better, in which case it must be intentional.
There's a classic book called How to Lie with Statistics, and another called How to Lie with Maps. Time for How to Lie with Charts?
A time and a place for everything, in my opinion. E.g. pie charts are good for communicating specific things to a wide and general audience, because everyone feels comfortable with the form at least.
3D pie charts are good for giving the appearance of analysis to people who wouldn't read them anyway.
In Excel, I use flattened 3D pie charts because they let me control the rotation of the chart to put the most important slices where I want them. That said, I don't use pie charts very often because my audience doesn't demand them
Sorry, but all kind of 3d stuff is horrible! Better, let's back a pie!
Sorry, but all kind of 3d chart stuff is horrible! Better, let's back a pie!
Ha Ha you are right, but why 3D on a flat screen that doesn't work I think and in the end it's all about the data right..
Call this the chandoo effect!!! Did u check out the same advertisement with a different type of chart in yesterdays newspapers??? Even the marketing managers listen to chandoo.
I've always disliked pie charts for this reason and exploded 3d pie charts makes a liar out of their creators. its like the old man and his fish story.... I promise to never make a 3d pie chart (unless its as a joke). If I ever see one, I promise to not rotate or explode it. I also promise to create alternative charts (usually column, bar, line or scatter plots) so that my audience can see the truth better.
And oh yeah, I promise to bake & eat pies whenever possible. Apart from cakes, pastries, ice creams, biscuits and other assorted fun foods that is.
I teach mathematics at high school, and this article will now feature as a regular teaching tool in the topic Misleading Graphs. Thank you.
...and along those lines, I realise I need to create more exploded 3D pie charts, more over-formatted graphs and more line graphs for categorical data to demonstrate poor graph choice.
...and the staircase graph is even worse than the 3D pie chart. When you analyse it in terms of the amount of yellow on the graph compared to any other colour - particularly green which was second - it appears that Verna holds at least 50% market share.
I ran through this graph as a lesson on Misuse of Graphs. We placed a 5mm grid over the image of the graph and counted the squares. The image is 58% yellow. This surprised the students because they were analysing the chart and interpreting it as about 40%. I remarked that the 58% yellow was influencing their judgement. It was a very good lesson.
Thanks for this great teaching resource.
For most practical reasons, I believe there is no need to use a 3D chart unless a Z-axis is needed for your data -- and pie charts need not be 3D since they don't need to show any axis!
Your method of telling the whole thing in this paragraph is genuinely good, every one be capable of simply
understand it, Thanks a lot.
I agree about pie charts. I didn't recognize the name "Verna" so I had to Google it: Hyundai sells the same car in the US as the "Accent."
I cant stand 3d pie charts. 2d ones are bad enough. And im my opinion the staircase chart is even worse. Note that with the verna we see two sides which gives it a visible width on the page/screen about three times as wide as the second highest scoring one, where we can only see one side of it.
However, I won't make the promise. Whilst I think acurate representation of stats is a morale obligation of those who need to present impartial data, you have to admire the marketing team for not missing a single trick.
Unfortunately with slick charts with the lighting and 3d effects, it makes acurate flat charts look boring and unprofessional to the uniformed 90% who view style over substance.
As an example of this, I was reading information packs from vendors, and out of the dozen or so, not a single one had flat charts....
Hi, Chandoo!
Can we download some chart template like in your post? ))
It is really pretty.
[…] Ah good day to my Tableau disciples. Peace be with you. May your day be free of exploding 3D pie charts… […]
[…] ovšem uvádí Chandoo, kolá?ové grafy lze naproti tomu dob?e využít k manipulaci. Linkovaný p?íklad s videem […]
[…] Even people who have the best of intentions create graphics that mislead just because they don’t know about statistics, they don’t know about logic, they about the principles of visualization. It’s not their fault, just like it was not my fault 10 or 15 years ago. Nobody had educated me. It was only through the process of reading books, studying, and learning from other people that I discovered the many mistakes that I’d made in the past, for example, creating 3D pie charts. […]
I think if the point is to create BS, everything should be not only in 3d but in 4d!
4d FTW
[…] makes it very difficult to visually compare data. A good example of how misleading a 3-D charts can be found here. Less is more. Make your visualizations as simple and clean as possible, it makes them much easier […]