Next time you want to make a chart to tell how your sales (defects, customer calls, page views, number of clicks, walk-ins etc.) are doing over a period of time, consider showing them in a min-max chart.
For eg. a min-max sales chart for the last 12 months tells average, minimum and maximum sales per each month. See below for an example:
Min Max Excel Chart - An Example of Monthly Sales Data
These are really easy to create and can tell more than simple sales are up story. The best part is you can make the min-max charts with ease.
1. Have your data ready
The first step of course is to have the data ready. It is not always you have the minimum, maximum sales details for a give month, so you may want to summarize the data before moving to the next step. For our example, let us revisit ACME products (trivia acme link for curious mice out there). The data looks like this:
2. Create an Area Chart
As you might have already guessed, these min-max charts are nothing but area charts in disguise.
So, select the tabular data and click on “insert > chart” and select area chart (just the simple area chart, not the stacked area chart)
3. Format the Chart to Get the Min-Max Effect
This is the last step. First you may want to adjust the data series order of the area chart to ensure that the areas are overlapped properly. See below:
To adjust the order, right click on any of the areas and select “format data series” option, then go to “series order” tab.
The only formatting necessary is filling the bottom most area with white color (the minimum part). But you can also remove the plot area background – the gray color and adjust the fonts. Also, you can adjust the colors of other 2 areas (average and maximum) and adjust the border line width of average to make it standout.
That is all, there are no further steps, so go ahead, create your own min-max chart and let the conversation begin.
Like this? Also try: Thermometer charts in Excel, Micro bar charts, Gantt charts with excel bar graphs
6 Responses to “A quick personal update”
Thank you for the personal update. It was quite encouraging and a breath of fresh air in my Inbox. Take care and stay safe.
David
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Wash metal surfaces as it can live on them 9 days
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Wash hands foaming 20 sec every 20 min
Eat fruit/veg and up zinc levels.
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If feel sore throat do above immediate as virus is there 3-4 days before descends into lungs
Would love help with my database mgt in excel.
Thanks for being thoughtful of us.
BTW How do you track your expenses/income in excel? Can you share the worksheet please.
Stay safe you and your family, best wishes.
Thanks for the update and happy to know that you and family are doing good. A 21 day lockdown has now been announced in India (I live around Kolkata) so it's uncertain times ahead. I check up on your wonderful articles often and will do so even more regularly now. Stay safe and God bless.
Hi from Argentina, I follow you for a lot of years now. We here are in a quarantine for 2 or 3 weeks, because the pandemia.
Excel is also my passion and I came here looking for a Num2Words formula, but in spanish. If anyone have it, please let me know.
Best regards.
Pablo Molina
La Rioja - Argentina
I'm glad to have your personal update. I'm from India & following you for so many years. Cheers to have any further personal update.