Format charts quickly with chart styles & color themes [quick tip]
Here is a quick tip to reduce the time you spend on chart formatting – use chart styles & color themes.
Excel offers various pre-defined color schemes and chart styles. Using them is very simple.
- Select your chart
- Go to Chart Design ribbon
- Click on the style or color scheme you want.
- Your chart changes instantly.
Color changing line chart [tutorial]
Let’s learn how to create a color changing line chart using Excel. This is what we will create.
Looks interesting? Read on.
Show forecast values in a different color with this simple trick [charting]
Let’s say you made a chart to show actual and forecast values. By default, both values look in same color. But we would like to separate forecast values by showing them in another color.
If you are a seasoned Excel user, you may be thinking, “Oh, that’s easy. I will just create 2 sets of data (one for actual and one for forecast), make a chart from them and apply separate colors.”
But here is a really simple way to get the same effect.
Use a semi-transparent box to mask the forecast values, as shown above. Read on to learn how to do this.
Use arrow keys to select small, unreachable chart series [quick tip]
Here is a fairly annoying problem.
Imagine a chart showing both sales & customer data. Sales numbers are large and customer numbers are small. So when you make a chart with both of these, selecting the smaller series (customers) becomes very difficult.
In such cases, you can use arrow keys – as shown above.
Formatting shortcuts for keyboard junkies
A lot of analysts swear strong allegiance to keyboard shortcuts. But when it comes to formatting a spreadsheet, these shortcuts go for a toss as formatting is a mouse-heavy activity.
But we can use a few simple & effective shortcuts to zip through various day to day formatting tasks. Let me share my favorite formatting shortcuts.
ABC Inventory Analysis using Excel
ABC analysis is a popular technique to understand and categorize inventories. Imagine you are handling inventory at a plant that manufactures high-end super expensive cars. Each car requires several parts (4,693 to be exact) to assemble. Some of these parts are very costly (say few thousand dollars per part), while others are cheap (50 cents per part). So how do you make sure that your inventory tracking efforts are optimized so that you waste less time on 50 cent parts & spend more time on costly ones?
This is where ABC analysis helps.
We group the parts in to 3 classes.
- Class A: High cost items. Very tight control & tracking.
- Class B: Medium cost items. Tight control & moderate tracking.
- Class C: Low cost items. No or little control & tracking.
Given a list of items (part numbers, unit costs & number of units needed for assembly), how do we automatically figure which class each item belongs to?
And how do we generate above ABC analysis chart from it?
Create a line chart with bands [tutorial]
Here is an interesting scenario.
Imagine you are responsible for customer satisfaction at ACME Inc. Every month you track customer satisfaction rate for the 3 products you sell which are conveniently named Product A, B & C.
You also have bands for the satisfaction rating.
- Rating of 85% or below is Average
- Rating between 85% & 95% is OK
- Rating above 95% is good
At the end of the year, you want to visualize the ratings for last 12 months for 3 products along with bands.
Something like above.
Unfortunately, there is no “Insert Banded line chart” button in Excel. So what to do?
That is what we will learn today. Ready?