Start your bar charts from zero – Excel geeks screaming at you from mountain top
Here is a simple but vital charting rule.
Start your bar (or column) charts from zero.
To illustrate why you should do this, let me share a personal example.
Over the weekend, the Jon Peltier visited Wellington. He is staying with Jeff (who occasionally guest blogs on Chandoo.org). On Sunday, we all decided to hike up a small mountain near my house for a leisurely family picnic.
While on the top of the mountain, Jo (my wife) took a few pics of us three Excel geeks. As we were standing on a sloping mountain face this is how the pictures look.
Looking at the picture on left, you would confidently say that I am way shorter than other two. But picture on right tells a different story.
“How Trump happened” in Excel [visualizations]
During last week, an alert reader of our blog, Jørgen emailed me a link to “How Trump happened“. It is an interactive visualization by Wall Street Journal. Jørgen asked me if we could replicate the visualization in Excel. My response: “Making a new chart in Excel? Hell yeah!”
Read on for awesome visualizations and full explanation.
Analyzing half a million consumer complaints [Part 1 of 3]
How would you analyze data when you have lots of it? That is the inspiration for this series.
Let’s meet our data – Finance Industry Consumer Complaints
As part of open data initiatives, US government & Consumer Financial Protection Bureau maintain a list of all consumer complaints made against financial institutions (banks, credit unions etc.) You can download this data from the catalog page here. I have obtained the data on 1st of February, 2016. The download has 513,824 records. Each row contains one complaint.
In this and next two parts of the series, we are going to analyze these half a million complaints to find insights.
CP046: Gantt charts & project planning using Excel
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In the 46th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s talk about gantt charts and project plans.
What is in this session?
In this podcast,
- A brief intro to Excel 2016
- What is a Gantt chart?
- How Gantt charts can help us?
- How to create Gantt charts in Excel
- Using bar charts with invisible series
- Using conditional formatting and formulas
- Using ready-made templates
- Resources on Gantt charts & project planning
- Conclusions
Make bar charts in original order of data for improved readability [charting tip]
To make friends in a new town hit the bars – Old saying.
To make sense of a new data-set, make bar charts – New saying.
Bar charts (or column charts if you like your data straight up) are vital in data analysis. They are easy to make. But one problem. By default, a bar chart show the original data in reverse order.
See the above example.
Unfortunately, we humans read from top to bottom, not the other way around.
Creating In-cell charts with markers for average (or target) values
Today, lets talk about an interesting extension to the idea of in-cell charts. Adding average or target markers to the chart.
Adding a marker (like average or target or last year value) can enhance your charts greatly and provide more context. Lets understand how to add marker symbols to in-cell charts.
Bar chart with lower & upper bounds [tutorial]
Bar & Column charts are very useful for comparison. Here is a little trick that can enhance them even more.
Lets say you are looking at sales of various products in a column chart. And you want to know how sales of a given product compare with a lower bound (last year sales) and an upper bound (competition benchmark). By adding these boundary markers, your chart instantly becomes even more meaningful.
Lets learn how to create a column chart with lower & upper bounds in this tutorial.