Histograms & Pareto charts in Excel – tutorial, tips and downloadable template

Time for some statistics and charting fun. Let’s learn all about histograms and Pareto charts in Excel 2016. You will learn

  • What, why and when?
  • How to set up and customize histograms
  • How to use Pareto charts?
  • How to create dynamic histograms?
  • Creating histograms in old Excel (2013 or prior versions)

Sounds interesting? Let’s get started then.

VLOOKUP that fat table with ease [3 quick tips]

Time for some good, old fashioned VLOOKUP love. Let’s say you are writing VLOOKUP()s to get data from an unusually fat table, ie one with heaps of columns. You want to get to lookup ID in first column and get thingamajig in what is that column number. Well, better get counting from 1 and after 19 seconds and lots of squinting you arrive at column number 53 – which has thingamajig. 

If this sounds like your VLOOKUP routine, check out these three amazingly simple tips to save some time and effort with your lookups.

Epic Introduction to Power BI [video]

Yay, finally our first ever full length Power BI tutorial is up. In this 30 minute video tutorial, learn how to get some data in to Power BI and make a quick report to understand it. We will be creating this.

customer-service-db-pbi-v1

Let’s get started then.

Convert unevenly spaced list to table [Data from Hell]

Introducing Data from Hell:

Watch out, its data from hell. In this new video series, we are going to examine some nutty, frustrating and fun data reshaping challenges and solve them using Excel. We will use Power Query, Formulas, VBA or other features as needed to free this data from damnation.

For our first installment, let’s reshape unevenly spaced list of values to a table.

Awesome chart to visualize Salary Increases for 3,500+ people [Tutorial]

Game for some charting awesomeness?

Off late, I have been doing a lot of data analysis and visualization on performance ratings, salary hike, gender pay equality etc. Today let me share you an awesome way to visualize massive amounts of data.

Scenario: Your organization of 3,686 people recently went thru annual performance ratings & review process. At the end of it, everyone was offered some salary increase (from $0 to $24,000 per year). You have 7 business groups. How do you tell the story of all these salary hikes in one chart?

How about the one above?

Ready to know how to create this in Excel? Read on.

Employee Performance Panel Charts in Power BI with R

Yesterday we saw a beautiful example of panel charts with R. Today let me show you how to create the same (or even better) with Power BI & R. What you need: Power BI Desktop and R Raw data set – rem-data.csv Creating Panel Charts in Power BI with R Load CSV data in to […]

Employee Performance Panel Charts – Excel vs. R [video]

Recently, I had to make a bunch of panel charts. After wrangling with Excel (and a tiny bit of VBA) to create them, I wondered if we are suffering needlessly by being too loyal to Excel. I switched to R and could create these panel charts in almost no time (well, first I had to learn how to pivot the data using dplyr). Today, let me share the experience.