Note: This product is no longer available. Andreas passed away sometime ago. May his soul rest in peace.
You can use Excel 2013 / 2016’s built in recommended charts feature along with default color scheme make this product almost irrelevant.
Readers of this blog repeatedly ask these questions when it comes to charting,
- Which chart should I use?
- What colors to use?
- How to format the chart better so that it looks good when printed / presented?
- How to do all this without wasting big part of my day?
Well, my dear reader, if this rings a bell with you, then you should probably consider Bonavista Chart Tamer excel add in. It is designed by the same folks who made the Bonavista Excel Microcharts product.
I was part of the private beta team which tested this great product few months back and have been using off and on ever since. So, when Andreas (the person behind Bonavista Systems, more here) mailed me 3 weeks back about the release of this tool, I couldn’t wait to write a review of this.
So what is Chart Tamer all about?
Chart tamer aims to solve the 2 pressing problems any excel user faces: (1) Which chart should I use? (2) How do I format it better?
You select some data, hit the chart tamer button in your excel interface, pick a chart based on what you want to show and bingo, you have your chart ready.
Who is behind this product?
Trust me when I say this not a run of the mill product. This tool is conceptualized and designed by Stephen Few (author of Information Dashboard Design
What is so great about chart tamer?
Chart selection made simple
When you are ready to create a new chart using chart tamer, just hit the chart tamer icon from your excel menu. And you see this beautifully designed UI. There are 2 ways to get started.
(1) You can specify the type of relationship your chart should depict and Chart tamer recommends the charts you should use. For eg. if you want to show the distribution of values, select “distribution” and you will see that the recommended charting options are Column, Bar, Line, Stacked Column, Stacked Bar and Dotted Line.
(2) You can also select the type of chart directly. This is more suitable if you already know what type of chart you want to construct.
Colors that work
We are good with numbers, charts and analysis. But when it comes to colors lot of don’t know the difference between magenta and margarita. And we shouldn’t really bother too. That is where chart tamer can help you. It has a color picker tool that provides excellent contrast and comparison. See it below.
Better formatted charts by default
How many times you have created a chart in excel and then tweaked it to get the desired effect. Well, with chart tamer, hopefully you spend less time formatting the chart and more time selling your story. Chart tamer reduces chart junk (like axis, labels etc.) by default and strives to improve data to ink ratio. See an example chart below.
Charts like box plot and dot&strip plot are bundled
Yes, that is true. When you install chart tamer, you can also create box plot and dot&strip plot with out any extra work.
See my review of chart tamer in You tube:
Youtube link in case you are not able to see this: Bonavista Chart Tamer Video review
What is not so great about it?
Chart tamer is designed for people who would love to stick to strong visualization principles and make good charts. That means, no to certain types of charts like donut charts, 3D charts etc. But the good news is, you can still create those charts using excel’s own charting options. What more, you can color the charts using chart tamer’s color picker dialog.
So, go ahead and give it a try
You can download a 30 day trial version of the software or buy a license of it from the chart tamer product page.
You can even buy a bundled version of chart tamer along with Bonavista microcharts. Go here.
I have used my affiliate code to recommend this product because I think it totally kicks ass.
What do you think about the chart tamer?
Have you tried it? Tell me what you think about it.
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...