6 Best charts to show % progress against goal
Back when I was working as a project lead, everyday my project manager would ask me the same question.
“Chandoo, whats the progress?”
He was so punctual about it, even on days when our coffee machine wasn’t working.
As you can see, tracking progress is an obsession we all have. At this very moment, if you pay close attention, you can hear mouse clicks of thousands of analysts and managers all over the world making project progress charts.
So today, lets talk about best charts to show % progress against a goal.
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.
Shading above or below a line in Excel charts [tutorial]
When comparing 2 sets of data, one question we always ask is,
- How is first set of numbers different from second set?
A classic example of this is, lets say you are comparing productivity figures of your company with industry averages. Merely seeing both your series as lines (or columns etc.) is not going to tell you the full story. But if we can shade our productivity line in red or green when it is under or above industry average… now that would be awesome! Something like above.
Designing a Customer Service Dashboard in Excel [Part 1 of 4]
Sawadee Krup folks. Today, we begin a new series on Chandoo.org – Making a Customer Service Dashboard using Excel. This 4 part tutorial teaches you,
Designing Customer Service Dashboard
Data and Calculations for the Dashboard
Creating the dashboard in Excel
Adding Macros & Final touches
Customer service is one area where a lot of data is collected regularly. Understanding all this and making business decisions is quite complex task. This is where dashboards shine.
Read on to learn how to design customer service dashboards.
Comparing Sales of One Product with Another [Excel Techniques]
This is a guest article by Theodor on how to Compare Sales of One Product with Another
Ok, now here’s one for you.
Suppose you’d like to come up with a sales report on different products, comparing their evolution on the same period of different years (say Jan ’09 vs. Jan Jan ’10). At the same time, you’d like to keep an eye on their yearly trend (entire 2009 vs. entire 2010).
Read on to learn how you can use Excel Charts to do this very easily.
Customer Service Dashboard using Excel [Dashword Week]
Early in Jan, I got this mail from Mara, a student in Excel School first batch.
Hi Chandoo,
I took your first Excel batch class and loved it. I created a dynamic and interactive dashboard for my work. My boss thinks it’s an excellent tool and I have you to thank for and also Francis Chin who shared his travel dynamic dashboard. I integrated things you taught so thanks so much!
I felt very proud reading her email, so I asked her if she can share the dashboard with some dummy data so that we all can learn from her example.
Being a lovely person Mara is, she gladly emailed me the workbook and I am thrilled to include it in Dashboard Week.
How would you Visualize World Education Ranking Data [Homework + Video]
Here is a charting challenge to begin your Christmas week. Recently Guardian’s Data Blog released World Education Rankings data and a sample visualization. Now your challenge is to make your chart visualizing World Education Rankings data.
You can see the chart I have constructed above. Read the rest of the post to find out how I made this chart and download the workbook.
Post your submissions using comments.