Employee training tracker & calendar – tutorial & download
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.
CP046: Gantt charts & project planning using Excel
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS
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
How countries spend their money – chart alternatives
Econimist’s daily chart is a one of my daily data porn stops. They take interesting data sets and visualize in compelling ways. While the daily chart page is insightful, sometimes they make poor charting choices. For example, this recent chart visualizing how countries spend their money uses a variation of notorious bubble chart. Click on the chart to enlarge.
What is wrong with this chart?
Bubble charts force us to measure and compare areas of circles. Unless you have a measuring tape somehow embedded in your eyes and you are a walking human scientific calculator, you would find this task impossible.
So when you look at the chart and want to find out what percentage Japanese spend on restaurants or how much Americans pay for housing, your guesses will have large error margins.
Not only bubble charts are difficult to read, they are very hard to align. So when you have a bunch of bubbles, no matter how hard you try, your chart looks clumsy (see how the Russian food bubble eats in to Mexico’s bubble, as if it is too hungry 😉 )
Let’s check out a few alternatives to this chart. Read on…
Make a quick funnel chart in Excel to track sales performance [video]
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.
Monthly Planner Template [downloads]
Here is an awesome planner template to help you manage activities over a month. It is useful for charity drives, activity planning, school schedules, marketing initiatives, project planning etc.
Read on to download a copy of the template & learn how to use it.
Dashboard best practice: Highlight user selection [video]
Here is a best practice to improve your dashboard usability. If you have an interactive dashboard, highlight user selections thru conditional formatting.
Check out below quick video to understand what this means.
In-cell 5 star chart – tutorial & template
Whenever we talk about product ratings & customer satisfaction, 5 star ratings come to our mind. Today, let’s learn how to create a simple & elegant 5 star in-cell chart in Excel. Something like above.
Read on to learn how to create the above chart.