We all know that area charts are great for understanding how a list of values have changed over time. Today, let’s learn how to create an area chart that shows different colors for upward & downward movements.
The inspiration for this came from a recent chart published in Wall Street Journal about Chinese stock markets (shown below).
We will try to create a similar chart using Excel.
This is what we are going to come up with.
Looks interesting? Read on…
Creating an area chart with different colors for up & down slopes
Step 1. Gather the data
For our example, let’s use Indian stock market data for last 10 years. Specifically, BSE Sensex weekly closing prices between 1-July-2005 and 27-July-2015.
There are 3 columns in this data – Date, Closing price & Volume, as shown below. Let’s say all of this data is in a tabled named data that starts at cell B6.
Step 2. Find out when to switch colors
The next step is to find out when to switch colors.
We can add 3 additional columns to our data to spot the switches, and split data to Advances & Declines accordingly.
Here is what we get.
Detecting when a switch occurs:
When looking at closing price for a day, we need to know if the line direction has changed or not. To detect this, we can use a formula like this:
Assuming the closing price we are looking at is in cell C7,
=C7<>MEDIAN(C6:C8) will tell us if the value in C7 is switching the trend or not.
Why does this formula work? Think again. For more on this technique, refer to BETWEEN Formula in Excel.
Step 3. Expanding the data so that we can create an area chart
If we create an area chart with just the data from above step (only advances & declines columns), we end up with a chart that looks like this.
As you can see, the green & red areas (advancing & declining data) have tiny white space between them.
This is because, when we switch from green to red, the green series goes from peak to 0 and simultaneously, red series goes from 0 to peak, creating an effect like below (chart made from sub-set of data)
To create correct shading effect, we need to expand the data so that on dates when switching happens, there is a duplicate row.
See below illustration to understand what we need.
Writing formulas to expand data
We can use simple arithmetic along with healthy dose of INDEX formulas to create expanded data set. Can you figure out the formulas yourself as homework?
Please examine the downloadable workbook to understand these formulas more.
After expanding the data, the same area chart looks like this:
Step 4. Create area chart from expanded dataset
Select the expanded advances & declines columns and create an area chart from them. Make sure horizontal axis labels are pointing to the expanded date column we constructed in step 3.
Your chart is ready now.
We can add few more bells and whistles to it and come up with below output.
- The volume chart at the bottom is a sparkline
- We can find longest bull & bear rallies using longest winning streak formula
Download Area Chart with different colors for up & down slopes workbook
Please click here to download area chart with different colors workbook. Play with the chart & formulas to learn more.
How do you like area chart with different shades?
I think this is a powerful technique to quickly eye-ball data and see where directional changes are occurring, what patterns (if any) are they following etc.
If you observe carefully, our Excel version and WSJ’s charts differ in one key aspect. In WSJ chart, they are shading bull & bear markets where overall trend is upwards or downwards with minor changes during the market period. What formula / approach changes do you think are necessary to make exact replica of WSJ chart in Excel?
Also, do share your feedback about this chart and how you are planning to reuse the concepts at your work.
Addendum – Moving average based smoothing of trends
We can use simple moving averages to smooth the trends so that we can spot upward / downward movements better.
Here is an example chart.
You may download this workbook to examine the formulas & chart.
Charts to show change over time
Understanding change is a key component of any analysis. Check out below charting techniques & tutorials to learn few more valuable skills.
- Narrating the story of change – Case study on how fast America changes its mind
- Advances vs. Declines chart
- How tax burden has changed over years – interactive Excel chart
- Use indexed charts when analyzing change over time
- Never show simple numbers in your dashboards
- Comparing with benchmarks – shading under / over achievement
29 Responses to “Customer Service Dashboard using Excel [Dashword Week]”
Looks good, Mara. Keep up the good work!
Thx Mara, your work is great, congratulations...
wow ! Great stuff Mara !!
I am amazed on the work you did !
What I like about your dashboard
1. The first impression is the colors used. Very smart use of colors that matches each other, easy on the eye - make people wants to find out more !
2. Clear message shown for the tweetboard for Quick overview on the state of situation.
3. Use of creative titles for your charts "Information Desk".
4. Clear and uncluttered charts. Gives reader a clear perspective with good use of charts colors too.
5. Good use of Legend to describe what color meant "Highest Sales out of the three months"
6. Of course, good use of Check boxes and Slider bar to offer interactiveness on your charts.
Suggestions
1. You may want to consider formatting your Y and X axis labels to show thousands, in $500K format instead of $500,000, so you can even made your chart look much neater.
2. Budget Variant Chart - This one is special...I took a second look and try to understand it. I am not sure if this is the best chart to visualize Sales VS Budget and Variances. And the Variance of 16.19% is positive, so u may want to use conditional formatting to make it green color, red if negative.
Overall is Great Work and Great Effort !!! Keep it up and I am so proud of you !
Francis Chin
http://www.francischin.com
Great Work Maya, just wondering if "5" Scrollable list of various gift shop items, can compare the previous 2 and current month selected in the above picklist, just one more suggestion if we can use top 5 gift category by using donut and bar mix chart to show sales mix for different months
Chandoo I would like to thank you for posting such helpful tricks for creating dashboards, I have learned a lot from your KPI Dashboard demo, I have created one dashboard to compare performce of Sales Associates, thaks a lot again
Thanks for the idea! Great job! You are giving me a lot of inspiratons!
Thanks everyone for the nice comments. I'm such a novice at this so I was so grateful for Chandoo's class and for everyone who submits ideas on his blog.
Francis: Thanks so much for your comments. You're an inspiration. For the budget variance chart, I actually got that idea from one of Chandoo's post on budget vs actual. There was one that was simple and easy to read so I learned how to do that and made it dynamic. I'm open to any other ideas you have for budget vs actual. I'm always looking for ways to improve.
Sabrina: Thank you for you for your suggestion on the top 5.
Dear Mara,
Great work.
But i one suggestion regarding the INFORMATION DESK graph is consist of month but which year it belong is not there if it would be there it would be great.
Warm Regards
Bhushan Sabbani
+91 98208 26012
Thanks for this idea... Great Stuff !!
Excellent dashboard Mara.
The best I like about the dashboard is the choice of colors. They are cool and not distracting. Thanks for sharing the file.
@Chandoo
Thanks for the dashboard week Chandoo. I am learnt a lot in the last 2 days. I am excited over the next 3 days! 🙂
Regards,
Ravi.
Great work Mara ! Thanks for sharing .
Mara, I liked the line, "Need to be more helpful." Our government needs to print this line, laminate it and post it in all government offices for the staff to see.
Hi there, i have been recently visiting this blog it is really great, the best one for Excel, wish Chandoo great success ahead.
I have one query, if you protect the data sheet the chart with the checkbox gives and error saying the data is protected and cannot be modified, is there a way around. This is cause if we want to publish this to someone who should only see it and do no changes to the data, is it possible please guide.
This could be a silly but bear me i am novice to excel 🙂
Thanks.
nice work.
inspired me a lot, working on few dashboard projects...
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dear mara
looks great .any reason why you have not used the bullet chart for the actual vs target chart.on the whole it is simple and elegant .jay.
Dear Chandoo,
The word Dashboard in the heading is misspelt.
Wow. Very Nice work Mara. Next week I am going to take the Course, I will try to post my work here.
Thank you so much for your helpful blog. Always appreciated your tips and tricks.
I am proud that you belongs to our Vizag City.
The above comment, I forgot mentioned about Chandoo, those two paras is about Chandoo. 😀
Thank you Mara!
Thx Mara, your work is great, congratulations…
Great Work Mara!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hi Chandoo,
I had been following your blogs for tips and tricks on excel. I am working with Media agency and we collect the data. Now this data has several parameters based on several legends. For eg Class A - legend color red, classB - legend color green and so on. Class A has several characteristics and parameters and heading etc. Now everytime we gather data and make pivot then based on the data in the pilot tables - top 10 we need to insert those in charts manually and also need to change the colors of legends and also. We create nearly 300 slides every month sector wise and it takes nearly our 4-5 days in doing that. Do you have any sample dashboard which will be helpfull to us and we can create it in a day.
Thanks really amazing one,
it helped me in desgining OTACE report
Regards
Gowravan M
9980651792
Awesome Job done here .............
very good master piece but wont to know if you can design KPI's for a financial institution. Thank you
I need help to make performance for our company
we have about 10 products from 5 years old