Over on Twitter, I came across this beautiful chart, aptly titled – Joyplot. It is the kind of chart that makes you all curious and awed. So I did what any Excel nerd would do. Recreated it in Excel of course. This post takes you thru the process.
Peak time for sports and leisure #dataviz. About time for a joyplot; might do a write-up on them. #rstats code at https://t.co/Q2AgW068Wa pic.twitter.com/SVT6pkB2hB
— Henrik Lindberg (@hnrklndbrg) July 8, 2017
First let me share the final outcome.
Joyplot in Excel – Peak time of the day for sports and leisure
Here is the final overlapped area chart with a bit of formatting thrown in. It is a pretty close imitation of Henrik’s original chart. Click on it to enlarge.
Creating Joyplot in Excel – Tutorial
As you can guess, the chart is a just an overlapped area chart (ie each area sits behind another, unlike stacked area chart where they are umm, well, stacked!)
Let’s start with a look at data. Henrik’s original data has 10,656 rows, each row containing activity name, time and p value – how much survey respondents enjoyed [@activity] at that time.
Here is a snapshot of first few rows.
Scrubbing and re-arranging the data
As you can see, while this format is excellent for storing, it is very tedious if we want to make one chart with all series. So let’s scrub.
- We need to figure out if an activity should be included or not. I am using the same criteria as Henrik’s. Exclude activities with p value less than 0.003 or activity title “Playing sports n.e.c. *” (not elsewhere classified)
- To do this, we first pivot the data on activity and max(p). Then filter this pivot two ways – max(p) >=0.003 and label not equal Playing sports n.e.c. *
Tip: You may need to enable multiple filters per field in the field settings of row labels. - We will end up with 28 activities.
- Then add a helper column to original table that looks up the pivot and tells if an activity should be included or not
- To do this, we first pivot the data on activity and max(p). Then filter this pivot two ways – max(p) >=0.003 and label not equal Playing sports n.e.c. *
- Add two more columns to original table to tell peak time and modified time. This will help us in rearranging and sorting the data. Modified time just moves time by 3 hours (Henrik’s chart is plotted from 3AM to 3AM). At this stage our data looks like this:
- Now, pivot the data once again. This time,
- exclude activities by using report filter on include? column.
- Set up peak and activity in row labels area, modified time in column labels area and p in values area.
- Arrange the report in tabular format, turn off sub-totals.
- We get this:
- Calculate normalized values by dividing each p value with maximum p value for that activity. We can use another range of 28×288 cells to do this. We get this:
- The next 2 steps may seem confusing. It will become clear once you look at the charts.
- Define an offset value. Start with 0.5. You can change this later. In a separate 28×288 cell range, calculate gaps by multiplying offset with position of an activity. Something like this:
- Now, finally calculate activity + gap values by adding up respective cells in each of the 28×288 ranges. We get this:
At this stage, our data is a shape ready for visualizing.
Creating and formatting overlapped area chart
The chart creation process has 5 steps.
- Select the 28×288 range of cells created in step 7 and insert an overlapped area chart.
- Now, copy the gaps range (created in step 6 above) and paste them on to area chart as new series (just ctrl+c your data and select the chart, press ctrl+v)
- Adjust the order of series so that each activity is sandwiched by appropriately named gap series
- Tip: adjusting 56 series is painful with the chart select data > move series up/down buttons. Instead, just select the series, look at formula bar. The SERIES formula has last parameter as order. Change this number. It is easy to figure out the number once you try a few.
- Change all gap series fill color to white. This instantly creates the floating area chart effect.
- Change the colors of activity series. Apply white / off-white border to these series. Your joyplot is ready.
Quick overview of the chart creation process:
Let’s examine the result of each those 5 steps with a smaller dataset so you can see how everything fits together. Here is the data for this example:
- Create an overlapped area chart with activity+gaps data. We get this:
- Add gaps as new series to chart. You get this:
- Move the gap series so that they sandwich activity series. Use Chart Data > Move series up/down buttons or SERIES formula
- Apply white color fill formatting for gap series. This creates floating area chart effect as below:
- Finally, format the chart by apply some colors and border formatting etc.
So there you go. The final outcome does look joyful.
Alternatives to Joyplot
While joyplot is awesome, it is not easy to make. Fortunately, there are a few simpler alternatives that we can whip up in Excel as soon as you have either the pivot or normalized values. Below I have shown two such examples. Read about sparklines or conditional formatting heatmaps for more.
Joyplot alternative – using sparklines:
Tip: to get axis on your sparkline, just type the times separated by a single space. Then go to format cell (ctrl+1) and set horizontal alignment to distributed. Viola, Excel will fill the cell by adjusting spaces.
Joyplot alternative – Conditional Formatting Heatmap
Download Joyplot Workbook
Click here to download Joyplot Excel workbook. Examine the data scrubbing formulas, pivot and chart settings to learn how this is created.
If you are familiar with R, then go thru Henrik’s R code. It is much shorter than the Excel gymnastics we did with circular pivot table referencing. That said, some of the data re-arrangement could be done with same ease in Power Query too.
Your thoughts on Joyplot?
The only step we missed in Excel implementation is moving average smoothing of the area charts. It can be easily added as a step between 3 and 4 in data stage.
How do you like Joyplot? Would you create something like this for your business / personal data? Share your stories and thoughts in the comments section.
More joy for you…
If you love this, you are going to enjoy these charts too.
30 Responses to “Rescue oddly shaped data – Battle between Formulas, VBA and Power Query”
Nice use of Power Query! Power Query is simply awesome! But somehow a lot of people are punishing themselves by not using it (not learning it).
An imperfect 4th approach for consideration... no codes at all...
Select myrange.
Go to Special --> Blank
Delete Cell --> Shift cell left
90% done... now we just need to move the data of 2nd column to the bottom of 1st column
Of course... Power Query is the best.
Cheers,
There is another way but it involves multiple steps:
Copy the values in column E, move the cursor to F5, Paste Special with Skip Blanks, OK
Copy the values in column D, move the cursor to F8, Paste Special with Skip Blanks, OK
And so on.
This works perfectly, albeit a little clumsily apart from the values in B17 and C16, which can be moved with simple copy and paste
Power Query Forever! I do not know how I survived for so long without knowing and using this tool, I can not recommend it to my colleagues, but by the way they prefer to suffer to learn.
My congratulations here from Brazil.
I rolled my eyes when I saw that data
Using decimal places is a nice trick to order data, thanks for that
And tweaking the first formula a bit, you can use OFFSET instead of INDIRECT
=OFFSET($A$1, MIN(IF(myrange, ROW(myrange)), ROWS(A$1:A1))-1, RIGHT(TEXT(MIN(IF(myrange, ROW(myrange) + COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001), ROWS(A$1:A1)), ".00000"), 5)-1)
Tried the above formula with the downloaded oddly shaped data file and I could not get it to work. I get #value without ctrl+shift+enter, and #ref with ctrl+shift+enter.
Sorry, it was SMALL, not MIN.
Add with CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER.
Thank you for your formula. Like the indirect formula I tested this one in older versions of EXCEL and it worked without ALTERATION in EXCEL 95. Very impressive.
Too complicated
Use =Sum to summarize all the sells to the left and Bobs Your Uncle
@Bertie... I am afraid that won't work when you have more than one value in a row.
I tested this formula in versions of Excel all the way back to Excel 95
=IF(ISERROR(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(MyRange"",ROW(MyRange)+COLUMN(MyRange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A9)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)),"",(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(MyRange"",ROW(MyRange)+COLUMN(MyRange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A9)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)))
So there are multiple ways of cleaning up messy data by formulas.
Wow.. Excel 95. Who knew people still use that. But as you have shown, Excel has all these beautiful and powerful functions for 23 years. It has data sciency stuff before DS was even a thing.
I had a problem with pasting the formula in the original post.
Formula should be: =IF(ISERROR(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(myrange"",ROW(myrange)+COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A1)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)),"",(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(myrange"",ROW(myrange)+COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A1)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)))
EXCEL even in a 16 bit version, is a very robust and capable program.
I don't like the VBA code. If you have a blank row in MyRange, the last entry in the range is doubled up in the paste.here range.
Not really. The macro is writing one cell at a time from paste.here. You have to clean the range before, which I was too lazy to write. But a line like Range(range("paste.here"), range("paste.here").end(xldown)).clearcontents should do the trick.
Adding Range(range("paste.here"), range("paste.here").end(xldown)).clearcontents fixed the problem.
for step split column by delimiter i am not getting option of split into rows or columns. Can you help me in this
Thanks Chandoo for promoting Power Query.
To simplify further, you can "Unpivot Columns" instead of right click on the newly created column and split it by comma in to rows in step 3 of Power Query.
i used
=LOOKUP(10000,B5:F5)
and got the answers. I just plagiarized this formula somewhere and use it, maybe you can explain why it works.
Regards
@Johan... I am not sure if the formula works correctly. When I tested it with the sample data in this post, it showed #N/As in two cells. Essentially, it will only give first value in each row. So if a row has multiple values, then subsequent values are missed. LOOKUP() function goes thru a list and finds the first value that is less than or equal to the input - in this case 10000 in B5:F5.
I have the need to convert pdf's to excel on occasion and they often come out a mess like this. I have used:
Cell G2 =COUNT(myrange)
Cell G3 =IFERROR(IF(G2-1<1,"",G2-1),"") copied down to G100
Cell H2 =IFERROR(LARGE(myrange,G2),"") copied down to H100
Waouw...
=IFERROR(INDIRECT("R" & SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(myrange "", ROW(myrange) + COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001),
ROWS(A$1:A1)), "00000.00000"), ".", "C"), FALSE), "")
but CTRL Shift Enter with {} before and after 🙂 😀
Here's a way with pivot table
https://www.bookkempt.com/2018/02/aligning-non-contiguous-data.html
This is brilliant. Bookmarked 🙂
Another possibility.
This assumes that you have a row index 'k' to use in the SMALL function and a column index 'h' to identify the columns of 'myRange'.
If you define 'coord' to refer to
=k+h/10 [assuming h<10]
then it will be possible to recover values later based upon location within 'myRange'. The formula 'nb' that identifies non-blanks by coordinates is given by
= SMALL( IF(myRange"", coord), k )
Finally, to unpick the pieces
= INDEX( myRange, INT(nb), 10*MOD(nb, 1) )
Whilst I am here and making trouble the PQ solution is also a tad over-complicated. All that is needed is to unpivot the entire table and remove the Attribute column.
The advanced editor would show
let
Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="myRange"]}[Content],
#"Unpivoted Columns" = Table.UnpivotOtherColumns(Source, {}, "Attribute", "Value"),
#"Removed Columns" = Table.RemoveColumns(#"Unpivoted Columns",{"Attribute"})
in
#"Removed Columns"
1.fill the blank cells with 0
2.the requested column value=sum of those mess number column
but this can be used in only one column has value
Chandoo
And if we use the formula SEARCH (100000000, B5: F5)
JC
Another approach with Power Query, it will still work if the number of columns changed:
let
Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="myrange"]}[Content],
#"Added Custom" = Table.AddColumn(Source, "List", each Record.ToList(_)),
#"Removed Other Columns" = Table.SelectColumns(#"Added Custom",{"List"}),
#"Expanded LIst" = Table.ExpandListColumn(#"Removed Other Columns", "List"),
#"Filtered Rows" = Table.SelectRows(#"Expanded LIst", each ([List] null))
in
#"Filtered Rows"
Cool idea to use Record.ToList as added column. Thanks for sharing this.
Nowadays, you can just use TOCOL on Excel 2024, MS 365, and Web Excel. It has a parameter to ignore blanks/errors/both.