Charts are great way to tell story about what is going on in your business. But they also feel a bit too impersonal and meh. How about adding your personality to them? I don’t mean making them tall, dark and pretty. I mean using hand-drawing style to make them pop out. Something like this example of hand-drawn chart:
The best thing is, You don’t need to actually draw these charts by hand. We can use a powerful charting trick to get these charts automatically generated (and linked) to your data. Interested? Read on to learn how to create hand-drawn charts in Excel.
Hand-drawn charts – Set up your data
Let’s say you have some data like this:
Add 2 more columns so that you can split the data in to Head & Rest like this:
Make a regular stacked column chart from your data
Select head & rest columns and insert a normal stacked column chart. Make sure head is on top of rest. You will get this:
Time to get drawing – create head & body images
Using your favorite drawing program (MS Paint / Power Point / Paint.Net or good old Excel itself), make a column drawing. Use the free form scribble tool from Insert > Shape to create these drawings in Excel or Power Point. See this demo:
How to create a hand-drawn column or bar in Excel?
Crop and split the drawing in to head & rest:
Once you made the drawing, paste it in to Excel as an image. Using Format ribbon, crop this in to head & tail as shown below:
Replace the column fill with images now – Ctrl+C Ctrl+V time…
Time to use the most important shortcuts in the world. CTRL+C and CTRL+V.
- Copy the head image from your drawing (CTRL+C)
- Select head series in the chart
- Paste (CTRL+V)
Bonus tip: Use images and shapes in your charts to prettify them
That is all. Your hand-drawn chart is ready. Share it with a colleague or boss and see them drool.
More hand-drawn inspiration for you…
Here are few more examples of what you could achieve with this technique.
Hand-drawn bar chart:
Hand-drawn line chart:
Caution: Don’t go overboard
I am a big fan of story telling with charts. While I appreciate the flexibility and possibilities Excel (and other tools like Power BI) offers, I strongly recommend that you do not go overboard with formatting charts. When used in moderation (or for a particular situation) these charts can evoke a laugh, thought or both. But when used in excess or out-of-place these can look silly. You have been warned.
See the entire thing in 90 seconds
Check out this recipe style video (with peppy background score) to re-cap all the key steps for creating hand-drawn charts.
You can also watch this on Chandoo.org YouTube Channel.
Download hand-drawn charts template
Click here to download free template with a few charts. Paste your data to get the charts or use the images elsewhere.
More creative charting techniques for you…
If you liked this hand-drawn chart, you will love below examples too:
Budget vs. Actual chart with variance & emotion:
Salary & Performance in a jitter plot
Twisted column charts (E90E50 Charts)
Tried your hand at hand-drawn charts?
Excuse the pun. How did it go? Did it draw crowd’s attention? Share your story and examples in the comments.
8 Responses to “Introducing PHD Sparkline Maker – Dead Simple way to Create Excel Sparklines”
This looks like it could be very useful for a project I'm putting together right now, thank you so much. Quick & silly question, how do I copy & paste the sparkline as a picture?
Question answered. For anyone else:
Select chart>Hold Shift key & select Edit/Copy Picture>Paste
[...] more information about PHD Sparkline Maker, please read this article and to learn more about Sparklines, read this article from Microsoft Excel 2010 blog. Also there [...]
Am I right in thinking that the y-axis is set automatically by excel?
That makes it possible to get the column chart not to start at zero.
Andy - yes, it is currently set to 'auto', which defaults to a zero base for positive values, but you can change that by left-clicking the chart, then choosing (in Excel 2007):
"Chart Tools/Layout/Axes/Primary Vertical Axis/More Primary Vertical Axis Options"
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: When manually editing a chart's minimum/maximum axis values, PLEASE be sure there's a valid reason and that doing so won't skew the message shown by the data (e.g. by exaggerating differences). If in doubt, go back and read Tufte. (W.W.T.D.?)
[...] gridlines, axis, legend, titles, labels etc.) and resize it so that it fits nicely in a cell [example]. This is the easiest and cleanest way to get sparklines in earlier versions of excel. However this [...]
thanks for the work creating the template!!!!
looks good