60 sports in six charts
On twitter I follow many charting and visualization related accounts. One of them is @Andy Kriebel, who runs Makeover Monday. The idea is simple. Every Monday they publish a data-set and ask the community to visualize. Last Monday (7th May, 2018), they have published about toughest sport by skill data. This categorizes 60 sports by 10 skill categories to find out which sport is the toughest. Over the weekend, Andy posted a summary of all toughest sport viz entries. Many of the entries are made in Tableau. I thought it would be a fun challenge to re-create some of these charts in Excel. The result is this post. 60 sports in 6 charts. Check out the charts and download workbook to learn more.
First four charts are re-creations of Tableau designs. Last two are mine.
Awesome chart to visualize Salary Increases for 3,500+ people [Tutorial]
Game for some charting awesomeness?
Off late, I have been doing a lot of data analysis and visualization on performance ratings, salary hike, gender pay equality etc. Today let me share you an awesome way to visualize massive amounts of data.
Scenario: Your organization of 3,686 people recently went thru annual performance ratings & review process. At the end of it, everyone was offered some salary increase (from $0 to $24,000 per year). You have 7 business groups. How do you tell the story of all these salary hikes in one chart?
How about the one above?
Ready to know how to create this in Excel? Read on.
Joyplot in Excel
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.
Take a look at final outcome above. Read on to learn more.
Interactive Decision Tree Visualization in Excel [Trump vs. Hillary in Swing States]
It is election time in USA, and that means there is a whole lot of drama, discussions and of course data analysis. There are tons of cool visualizations published on all the data. Previously, we talked about “How Trump happened” chart.
Today let’s take a look at the beautiful decision tree chart by NY Times explaining what would happen if each of the 10 swing states vote for Democrats or Republicans. Go ahead and look at that chart. And when you are done playing with it, come back.
My first thought after looking at the chart is: Wow, that is cool. I wonder how we can recreate that experience in Excel?
But as you can guess, making a dynamic tree visualization in Excel is pretty hard. You can create a bubble chart mixed with XY chart to show all the nodes of the decision tree, but as this tree has 2^10 nodes at the bottom level (and 2^11-1 total nodes) our chart would look very clumsy and busy.
So, instead of replicating NY Times chart, why not make our own version that explains the data? You can reuse this idea when visualizing outcomes of several what-if scenarios.
Mapping Spread of Obesity [Chart Critique and Alternatives]
Over at Flowing Data, Nathan has published an interesting visualization about spread of obesity.
While the above chart is quite interesting, it doesn’t offer much insight in to the data. There are a few drawbacks,
- Understanding obesity trends for a given state over the years is hard due to the layout and format of the chart.
- Finding which states are experiencing most obesity growth rates is not possible
- Ironically, the chart itself is obese. It takes too much space to explain the data.
Nevertheless, the chart looks cool and can be reused with smaller data-sets (quarterly trends or just for a few years). So let’s recreate the same in Excel. While we are at it, let’s also build an alternative visualization to explore the obesity data.
Visualizing target vs. actual progress – Biker on a hill chart
Over the years, we have discussed a whole heap of techniques to visualize budget vs. actual charts. Today let’s take a ride on this slope again and learn another fun, silly & awesome way to depict target vs. actual progress.
Introducing biker on a hill chart
Tada!!!
Biker on a hill!?! Don’t worry, I didn’t fall down on a descent and lose my brain. I am talking about an Excel chart to visualize target vs. actual progress on a time line with biker on a hill analogy. See the above chart, you will know.
Looks interesting? Read on to learn how to create this in Excel.
Stacked Bar/Column Chart with Indicator Arrows – Advanced
Lets take last weeks Stacked Bar/Column Chart and add some high-performance steroids.