Few days back, I ran my first ever webinar, on a topic called, “How to be a BETTER Analyst?” (here is the replay link, in case you missed it). It was a huge success. More than 1,100 people attended the live webinar and hundreds more watched the replay. As part of the webinar, we had interactive Q&A. Viewers posted their questions and I replied to as many of them as I can.
After the webinar, I wanted to make sure I covered all the questions. So I downloaded the chat history. There were more than 700 messages in it. And I am not in the mood to read line by line to find-out the questions. A good portion of chat messages were not questions but stuff like ‘hello everyone, I am from Idaho’, ‘Wow, Chandoo has beard!”, “Enjoying a beer in Belgium while watching webinar” etc. So I wanted a quick way to flag the messages as question or not.
I did what any sensible Excel analyst would do.
I made myself a hot cup of coffee, started playing games on my iPhone while sipping it.
Of course after a cup of coffee and a bout of Candy Crush, I wrote simple Excel formula to find-out if the text in a cell is question or not. Let me share the formula & logic with you.
Let’s take a look at the data
This is how the downloaded chat history looked like when imported to Excel. The column on right is where we need to write formula to find out if the comment is a question or not.
For the sake of simplicity, assume this data is in column B, starting with cell B5.
The logic for identifying questions
In real life, finding if the other person is asking a question or just saying something can be tricky. For example, last evening my wife said, “Shall we go shopping?” and I assumed it was a question and said “no”. Apparently, it wasn’t a question. You can guess the rest.
Unlike real life, in Excel, we can come up with good enough approximation to nail down questions.
For example, if a cell contains any of the below words, we can say it is a question.
What, why, how, who, when, where, is it, can I, can you, which, is this, are you, can we, are we, am I
This is a pretty good way to separate questions from non-questions.
Let’s assume all the question words are maintained in a named range called q.words
Writing the formula
So here is the formula to check if a cell contains question or not.
=SUMPRODUCT(COUNTIFS(B5,"*"&q.words&"*"))>0
How does this formula work?
Remember, B5 is the cell in question (no pun).
We need to see anywhere in B5, one of the question words occur.
This is where COUNTIFS formula helps. It can count how many times a value has occurred in a range.
In our case, if B5 contains any of the question words. Note that B5 can contain other text too (apart from question words).
The formula COUNTIFS(B5,"*"&q.words&"*") will return an array of size 15 (as q.words contains 15 question words).
Let’s assume B5 has the text – “Why didn’t you take your wife to shopping?”
So, our COUNTIFS(B5...) will return the array {0;1;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0;0}
The second item is 1 because second question word is Why.
If B5 has this text – “How I wish I took my wife to shopping. Can I take her now?”
COUNTIFS(..) will return this array {0;0;1;0;0;0;0;1;0;0;0;0;0;0;0} because it found the question words How and Can I.
But we don’t want the array…
You are right. We don’t need the array of 15 elements. We just want to know if any of the questions are present in the B5 cell.
So, we pass this array to SUMPRODUCT, which sums up all the numbers and tells us single value.
We then check if this value is >0 or not.
So there you have it. A formula to find out if a cell has question or not.
A question for you…
Do you conduct text analysis using Excel? What techniques do you use? Please share your approach & formulas in the comments.
Bonus material for text analysis using Excel
If you deal with lots of text data, you will find below resources very useful.
- Finding patterns in Text – case study problem
- Extracting file name from full path
- Analyzing search keywords & finding word frequency
- Analyzing 20,000 comments – Case study
- Sentiment analysis of text using Excel
- More on text processing & analysis using Excel
Now if you excuse me, I need to take my wife for shopping. 🙂
31 Responses to “Beautiful Budget vs. Actual chart to make your boss love you”
Would be considerably easier just to have a table with the variance shown.
On Step 3, how do you "Add budget and actual values to the chart again"?
There are a few ways to do it.
Easy:
1) Copy just the numbers from both columns (Select, CTRL+C)
2) Select the chart and hit CTRL+V to paste. This adds them to chart.
Traditional:
1) Right click on chart and go to "select data..."
2) From the dialog, click on "Add" button and add one series at a time.
One more way to accomplish it is just select the columns into chart. Press Ctrl+C and then press Ctrl+V
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work for me in Excel 2010. The "Var 1" and "Var 2" columns cannot combine two fonts to display the symbol and the figure side-by-side.
Secondly, there is no option to Click on “Value from cells” option when formatting the label options. The only options provided are Series Name, Category Name or Value.
@TheQ47... the emoji font also has normal English letters, so if you use that font, then you should be ok. I am assuming your computer doesn't have that font or hasn't been upgraded for emoji support.
Reg. Excel 2010, you can manually link each label to a cell value. Just select one label at a time (click on labels, wait a second, click on an individual label) and press = and link it to the label var 1 or var 2.
I am using excel 2010, please explain how to apply Step 12
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Hi Neeraj,
"Value from cells" option is only available in Excel 2013 or above. In older versions, you have to manually adjust the label value by linking each label seperately.
Read this please: https://chandoo.org/wp/change-data-labels-in-charts/
Sir, you are just awesome.
Your creativity has no limit.
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Hi Chandoo,
I just found your website, and really love it. It helps me a lot to be an Excel expert 😉
Currently I am facing with a problem at step 11:
Var1 Var2
D30%
A5%
B0%
B4%
B7%
C10%
C13%
D27%
I42%
Though at mapping table, I used windings, here formula uses calibra. How I can change it? I am able to change only the whole cell. In this case numbers will be Windings too.
Thanks for your help!
Hi Mariann... Welcome to Chandoo.org and thanks for your comment.
If you wanted to use symbols from wingdings and combine them with % numbers, then you need to setup two labels. One with symbol, in wingdings font and another with value in normal font. Just add the same series again to the chart, make it invisible, add labels. You may need to adjust the alignment / position of label so everything is visible.
[…] firs article explains how you can enhance your charts with symbols. You can simply insert any supported symbol into your data and charts. To some extend you can […]
You're a good person, thank you to share your knowledge with us, I will try to do in my work
Great visualization of variance. My question is that is this possible in powerbi?
How would you go about it?
HELLO, WHY CANT I FIND VALUES FOR LABELS IN EXCEL 2013
Dear chanddo sir,
What to do if we have dynamic range for Chart. How this will work. can you able to make the same thing works on dynamic range.
Sir Chandoo,
Good Day!
First, I'd like to say that I am very grateful for your work and for sharing all these things with us.
I tried to do this chart but it seems that the symbols don't work with text (abs(var%),"0%") unless we keep the Windings font style.
The problem is, it converts the text into symbol as well and you wont see the 0% anymore. I'm using Windows 7.
WOW - Segoe UI Emoji
This is the greatest discovery for me this month 🙂 Thanks for sharing.
Here's my two-cents:
https://wmfexcel.com/2019/02/17/a-compelling-chart-in-three-minutes/
Sir This is awesome chart, and very easy to made because of your way to explain is very simple , everyone can do. Thank you
one problem i am facing, I hv made this chart , but when i am inserting data table to chart it is showing two times , how can i resolve this
in this chart when i am adding new month data for example first i made this chart jan to mar but when i add data for the apr month graphs updated automatically but labels are missing for that new month
Hi Renuka,
Please make sure the formulas for labels are also calculated for extra months. Just drag down the series and set label range to appropriate address.
So I am playing with the Actual chart here - but amounts are bigger than your - you have 600 as Budget - my budget is 104,000 - is there a way to shorten that I am unaware of
thank you - I LOVE YOUR SITE
Thanks for the tips and tricks on Excel. In the Planned versus Actual chart examples, you use multiple values (ex. multiple Categories in above). How can this be done when we have only 1 set of values? For example if I have only this:
Planned Actual
SOW Budget 417480 367551
How can I create a single bar chart like the one above?
Thank you Chandoo.
This one is just perfect for my Quarterly Review presentation on Operational Budget against Actual Performance for the Hospital I'm currently working with.
Just Subscribed today (10 minutes ago)
Is there a way to make the table of data into a pivot table to be able to add a slicer for the graph due to many different categories and months?
Hi, I tried to modify you template with something appropriate for me, and I found a problem. this template was modified by me started with excel 2010, then 2016 and finally 2019. Same thing - somehow appear an error - or didn't show the emoticons for positive percentage or doubled the emoticons for some rows. I suspect to be from excel. if is need it I can sand you my xlsx for study. Please help if you can.
Hi Chandoo,
Could you please check the Var Formula in Step1. You have mentioned budget-actual and when i did this i got different values but when reversed like actual-budget i got the actual value what you have demonstrated in step1.
Please share your view.
This is a great chart (budget vs. actual). However, in trying recreate it, I cannot color in the UP Down bars individually, and they all become formatted with the same color. I'm using Office 365. Look forward to the feedback.
Thanks.
Dan
pls explain in detail step 7
While in the Excel sheet you have used following formula for Var
Var = Actual - Budget
But
in the note, you have written
Var = Budget - Actual
Good Presentation and Data information.thank you so much chandoo.