All articles with 'charting' Tag

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.

Here is an interesting chart from Economist, ironically titled The weight of the world. Can you tell what is wrong with it?

Yesterday I saw a tweet from @JanWillemTulp with random snow flake generator.

That got me thinking…? Why can’t we make a snow flake pattern in Excel?

This is what I came up with.

Read on to know more about this snow flake and download the example workbook.

Let’s learn how to create a color changing line chart using Excel. This is what we will create.

Looks interesting? Read on.

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This is going to be epic!!! In the 50th session of Chandoo.org podcast, we have 50 Excel tips to make you awesome.

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

• Thank you message
• Fifty tips in 5 buckets
  • Shortcuts & Productivity
  • Formulas
  • Managing Data
  • Charts
  • Using Excel better

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In the 49th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s talk about data dumps!

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

• What is a data dump
• Examples of data dump
• Why we dump
• Ways to avoid data dumps
  • Go for information dumps
  • Sort the dump
  • Filter the dump
  • Give a table
• Resources for you

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In the 48th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s make some animated charts!!!

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

• Announcements
• Why animate your charts?
• Non-VBA methods to animate charts
  • Excel 2013’s built-in animation effects
  • Iterative formula approach
• VBA based animation
  • Cartoon film analogy
  • Understanding the VBA part
• Example animated chart – Sales of a new product
• Resources and downloads for you

Imagine you are the head of training department at ACME Inc. You arrange training programs round the year to empower your team. It is hard work, coordinating between employees, trainers, department heads, venues and coffee machines. What if there is something to help you keep track of all this? I am not talking about getting you a shiny new iPad, you silly. I am talking about a tracker & calendar built in Excel that ties everything together (well, almost everything, you still have to fill the coffee machine.)

We are going to build a training program tracker & calendar using Excel.

Here is a quick visualization challenge for you.

There are 25 KPIs and each has a base value, current month, corresponding month values. The KPIs also have targets.

The data looks like this:

Download the data:

Click here to download the data for this contest.

Rules for this contest:

• Visualize this data using one Excel chart (one chart per KPI is ok too).
• You may omit any any data
• You can use interactive charts.
• Do not use add-ins or VBA to make your charts

Go ahead and make your chart(s).

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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

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.

We know that column charts are excellent for presenting information. But what if some of the columns are too tall and hijacking the rest. In a previous article, we discussed few of the approaches. Today let’s learn how to build a cropped chart (broken y-axis chart) using Excel, something like above.

Looks interesting? Read on.

Funnel charts are useful to visualize sales & marketing performance. In this brief video, let’s understand how to make a quick funnel chart in Excel.

Read on to learn how to make funnel charts & to download a template for your funnel analysis needs.

Here is a simple & effective tip on charting.

Give your charts descriptive & bold titles.

How to set up title that are smart & descriptive?

Simple, follow below steps.

1. Create the title you want in a cell
2. Select the chart title
3. Go to formula bar, press = and point to the cell with title
4. Press enter.

Whenever you have a dashboard that is quite long or spans across multiple worksheet tabs, it can be hard to use. Here is a simple trick to make your dashboards user friendly. If your dashboard has form controls, create duplicate sets of them and place them in locations where users are looking. For example, If your […]