Japanese Candlestick Chart or Candlestick Chart as they are popularly known are one of the most commonly used stock charts.
According to Wikipedia, a Japanese Candle Stick Chart is,
Candlesticks are usually composed of the body (black or white), an upper and a lower shadow (wick). The wick illustrates the highest and lowest traded prices of a stock during the time interval represented. The body illustrates the opening and closing trades. If the stock closed higher than it opened, the body is white, with the opening price at the bottom of the body and the closing price at the top. If the stock closed lower than it opened, the body is black, with the opening price at the top and the closing price at the bottom. A candlestick need not have either a body or a wick.
Today we will learn how to make a candlestick chart in Microsoft Excel in 4 simple steps. For our purpose, we will plot candlestick chart for Apple stock prices between Jan 26 and May 02.
1. First get the stock price data
You can get stock price details – open, high, low, close prices for the stock chart from anywhere. I have used google finance (here)
The data should be in this format for us to make the chart:
2. Insert stock chart
Select your data and launch insert chart dialog and select “stock chart” as type and “Open High Low Close Chart” as sub-type.
This will insert a chart like the one shown below.
However there is a problem with this chart: excel leaves blanks when stock market is on leave (for eg. weekends) so,
3. We change the axis type from time-scale to category
Right click the chart and select chart options and in the “axes” tab change the category axis type from “automatic” to “category”. This ensures that excel treats dates as categories instead of times and thus removes the blanks.
But when we do this, excel reverse the dates, thus your new chart would read from 02 march to 26 jan instead of the otherway around. To fix this, select the category axis, and check the categories in reverse order and value axis crosses at maximum category options. This sets the date order correctly.
4. We are almost done, now format the chart
Adjust axis scaling options, grid lines etc and you have a Japanese candlestick stock chart ready.
Download the Japanese Candlestick Chart Template
Go ahead and download the Japanese Candlestick Chart Tutorial workbook and use the template to make stock charts.
More Stock Charts using Excel
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8 Responses to “Pivot Tables from large data-sets – 5 examples”
Do you have links to any sites that can provide free, large, test data sets. Both large in diversity and large in total number of rows.
Good question Ron. I suggest checking out kaggle.com, data.world or create your own with randbetween(). You can also get a complex business data-set from Microsoft Power BI website. It is contoso retail data.
Hi Chandoo,
I work with large data sets all the time (80-200MB files with 100Ks of rows and 20-40 columns) and I've taken a few steps to reduce the size (20-60MB) so they can better shared and work more quickly. These steps include: creating custom calculations in the pivot instead of having additional data columns, deleting the data tab and saving as an xlsb. I've even tried indexmatch instead of vlookup--although I'm not sure that saved much. Are there any other tricks to further reduce the file size? thanks, Steve
Hi Steve,
Good tips on how to reduce the file size and / or process time. Another thing I would definitely try is to use Data Model to load the data rather than keep it in the file. You would be,
1. connect to source data file thru Power Query
2. filter away any columns / rows that are not needed
3. load the data to model
4. make pivots from it
This would reduce the file size while providing all the answers you need.
Give it a try. See this video for some help - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u7bpysO3FQ
Normally when Excel processes data it utilizes all four cores on a processor. Is it true that Excel reduces to only using two cores When calculating tables? Same issue if there were two cores present, it would reduce to one in a table?
I ask because, I have personally noticed when i use tables the data is much slower than if I would have filtered it. I like tables for obvious reasons when working with datasets. Is this true.
John:
I don't know if it is true that Excel Table processing only uses 2 threads/cores, but it is entirely possible. The program has to be enabled to handle multiple parallel threads. Excel Lists/Tables were added long ago, at a time when 2 processes was a reasonable upper limit. And, it could be that there simply is no way to program table processing to use more than 2 threads at a time...
When I've got a large data set, I will set my Excel priority to High thru Task Manager to allow it to use more available processing. Never use RealTime priority or you're completely locked up until Excel finishes.
That is a good tip Jen...