A Brief History of Microsoft Excel – Timeline Visualization
Timeline charts are great for providing quick snapshots of historical events. And hardly a day goes by without some one making a cool visualization of a time line of this or that. Time lines are easy to read, present information in a logical manner and mostly fun.
So yesterday, I set out to mimic the iconic gadgets of all time in excel, just for fun. Then it strike me, why not make a visual time line of Microsoft Excel ? So I did that instead.
Collapse, Expand Excel Charts using this hidden trick
Do you know that you collapse or expand excel charts? Don’t believe me? Me neither. When I first realized that we can collapse / expand charts without writing any macros or lengthy formulas, I couldn’t wait to share it with all of you. This is such a simple yet powerful trick. See it for yourself.
The trick lies in using group / un-group data feature and carefully aligning charts with the cell grid. The whole process takes just about 2 minutes and produces wow factor worth a week. Go check it, now. Also, a downloadable template is included in the post.
Sales Dashboards – Visualizing Sales Data – 32 Dashboard Examples & Implementations
Sales reports and dashboards are very common in any company. There are several ways in which you can visualize sales data to understand the trends and sales performance. So in November, I have asked you to visualize sales data using sample data. The visualization challenge #2, sponsored by Zoho Reports generated a huge buzz around the community and fetched 32 incredible entries. The response was so overwhelming that it took me almost 24 hours to write this post. Thanks everyone for participating and making this a huge learning experience for everyone. Personally I have learned several useful dashboard and charting tricks. I will be sharing some of these lessons with all of you in the coming weeks.
Make a Quick Thermometer Chart to Compare Targets and Actuals
Comparing values is one of the reasons why we make charts. So today I am going to teach you a handy little trick to make a thermometer like chart to compare targets with actuals. This type of chart is very useful when you have a bunch of sales targets and you want to measure how the performance has been.
Top X chart – Show Top X values of a chart Interactively
Two charting principles we hear all the time are,
- Sort your data in a meaningful order before plotting it.
- Show only relevant information, not everything – because un-necessary information clutters the chart.
Today we will learn a dynamic charting technique that will mix these two ideas in a useful way. I call this a Top X chart.
Dashboard Best Practice – Google Analytics Intelligence Report
Yesterday while checking my website analytics reports on Google analytics site, I have noticed a new beta feature called “Intelligence”. Out of curiosity I clicked on it. It took me to a an intelligence alert dashboard. Ok, lets just back up for a minute and understand what “intelligence dashboard” is before moving on. In the […]
Switch Rows and Columns in Charts [Quick Charting Tip]
Let us say you have built a nice chart showing your sales and profits for the top 5 products (learn how to highlight top 5 products in a list), with products on X axis. Suddenly your boss wants to switch the rows to columns (or transpose the chart) so that she can see metric level grouping instead of product level grouping. No need to freak out and rush to Espresso machine, You can do it very easily with Excel Charting features.
In today’s quick tip you will learn how to swap chart rows and columns in excel.