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Stacked Bar and Indicator Arrow Chart – Tutorial

Learn how to develop a Stacked Bar chart with Indicator Arrow in this Tutorial

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September 12, 2016

Tell me about an analysis problem that you couldn’t solve with Excel?

Time for a quick show & tell.

Tell me about an analysis problem that you couldn’t solve with Excel?

It can be because you didn’t know how to solve the problem or Excel isn’t the tool for it or any other reason.

Go ahead and speak up. Post your tricky analysis problems in the comments section.

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September 9, 2016

18 ways to turn analysis projects into a nightmare

Every week, we read news about failed analysis projects. If you listen carefully, you can hear the grunts, screams and curses of thousands of analysts all over the world about their analysis nightmares.

At Chandoo.org, we talk a lot about best practices for data analytics. So today, let’s peek in to the dark side and understand the mistakes that can turn your analysis project into a nightmare.

There are 3 parts in any analysis project

To understand these worst practices in analysis world, first let’s break analysis projects in to 3 parts.

Requirements
Data Structure
Tools & Construction

Let’s deep dive in to each area of the analysis projects to see what can go wrong.

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September 5, 2016

Hourly Goals Chart with Conditional Formatting

A while back I developed a solution to a Chandoo.org Forum question, where the user wanted a 4 level doughnut chart where each doughnut was made up of 12 segments and each segment was to be colored based on a value within a range. If the values changed he wanted the chart to update, Conditional Formating like:
This post looks at how this was achieved.

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September 1, 2016

Visualizing Financial Metrics – 30 Alternatives

Around 2 months back, I asked you to visualize multiple variable data for 4 companies using Excel. 30 of you responded to the challenge with several interesting and awesome charts, dashboards and reports to visualize the financial metric data. Today, let’s take a look at the contest entries and learn from them.

First a quick note:

I am really sorry for the delay in compiling the results for this contest. Originally I planned to announce them during last week of July. But my move to New Zealand disrupted the workflow. I know the contestants have poured in a lot of time & effort in creating these fabulous workbook and it is unfair on my part. I am sorry and I will manage future contests better.

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August 30, 2016

PSA: Don’t let auto correct spoil your party

So here is a news from strange but true department. Microsoft Excel blamed for gene study errors [bbc.com].

Microsoft’s Excel has been blamed for errors in academic papers on genomics.
Researchers trying to raise awareness of the issue claim that the spreadsheet software automatically converts the names of certain genes into dates.
Gene symbols like SEPT2 (Septin 2) were found to be altered to “September 2”.

Aah, classic!

This is what happens when you spend countless hours learning genome sequencing and very little about the software tools where your data goes. May be we need clippy back to warn people about such sticky situations.

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August 26, 2016

Analyzing 300,000 calls for help [case study]

Over the weekend, I got an email from Mr. E, one of my students. Mr. E works at a police department in California and as part of his work, he was looking at calls received by police. Whenever police get a call for help, multiple teams can respond to the call and go to the location. All of these dispatches are recorded. So a single call can have several such dispatches. And Mr. E wanted to findout which team responded the first. The problem?

Finding the first responded team is tricky.

Today let’s take up this problem as a case study and understand various methods to solve it. We are going to learn about writing better lookups, pivot tables, power pivot and optimization. Put on your helmets, cause this is going to be mind blowingly awesome.

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August 24, 2016

Weekend open mic – Share your one hand Excel shortcuts

At Chandoo.org, we are big believers of keyboard shortcuts. There are several posts (1,2,3,4, more and even more) discussing useful Excel shortcuts. Today I want to introduce a new kind of keyboard shortcuts. One hand shortcuts.

One hand shortcuts – Half the work, double the fun

The idea is simple. When you can use only one hand to complete the shortcut key presses, it is called as a one hand shortcut.

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August 12, 2016