All articles with 'downloads' Tag

When analyzing business data like sales, shop visits or productivity, one of the questions managers always ask is,

What is the best month / week for this data?

To answer this question, we need to make a chart that looks like above. Today, lets learn how to highlight portions of such charts that correspond to best week or best month.

Did you know What Happened at Last Coffee Day?
Mr. Bean “dressed up” the financial statements and was caught in the fraud. But he was the CEO of Latte! So why did he commit fraud in his own company??

Any Guess?

Take a cappuccino and I will give you a hint – How was Mr. Bean’s Bonus to be decided?

Read on to know more…

If I need some charting inspiration, I always visit New York Times. Their interactive visualizations are some of the best you can find anywhere. Clear, beautifully crafted and powerful. Long time readers of Chandoo.org knew that I like to learn from visualizations in NY Times & redo them using Excel.

Today let me present you one such chart. This is based on an interactive visualization prepared by NY Times explaining how the tax burden has changed over years for various income groups.

Take a look at tax burden chart – Excel implementation

Read on to learn how to create this chart using Excel.

In the first part on our Modeling Best Practices series, we learned 5 best practices to follow. This article shows how to automatically implement the best practices using macros.

In this post we will learn how to use the Advanced Filter option using VBA to allow us to filter our data on a separate sheet. This has been requested by a lot of our readers and here is how we will use them.

A Quick Question for you!
Don the hat of a financial wiz today. What I have for you are the financials of two companies: Cappuccino and Latte – Two dot com companies (Sometimes they also make revenues ;-))

Which is better – Cappuccino or Latte? ( Hint: It’s a trick question! 😉 )

It may seem obvious that Latte is performing better (Higher the revenue, the better the performance!). Sometimes a single source of data does not speak the full story!

In this 2 part tutorial, we will learn how to design a project portfolio dashboard. Part 1 discussed user needs & design. Part 2 will show you Excel implementation.

Final Implementation – Project Portfolio Dashboard

First lets take a look at the finalized dashboard implementation. Continue reading to learn more & download this dashboard.

My heartiest Diwali wishes to all our readers.

The spirit of Diwali is to encourage people to spread joy, celebrate good things and throw away darkness (evil). These ideas are universal. So let me wish you a very happy Diwali.

Diwali, festival of lights, is celebrated in the month of October / November. It is one of my favorite festivals since childhood. A time when all family members get together, celebrate all the good in their life, laugh and light a few fire crackers (fire works).

This year, our kids (Nishanth & Nakshatra) too are excited about the festival. They are eager to light diyas (small lamps), watch the fire works and enjoy. Naturally I do not feel like opening Excel.

But then…,

Sometime during my morning coffee, I thought “hey, why not create a small Diwali greeting using Excel?”

So here we go.

Pivot tables are great help when analyzing lots of data. One of the common questions managers & analysts ask (when looking at monthly sales data for example) is,

How is the monthly performance of our teams (or regions, products etc.)?

A pivot report can answer this question in a snap. Today lets learn how to do that.

Hurricane Sandy has taken front seat in all major news channels, papers, websites even in far off places like India. I hope & pray that our readers in US East coast are safe.

Today, lets understand the journey of Hurricane Sandy in this animated chart, prepared by Chris from Excel365.

Today lets tackle a very familiar problem. You have a bunch of very long, complicated file names & paths. Your boss wants a list of files extracted from these paths, like below:

Of course nothing is impossible. You just need correct ingredients. I cannot help you with a strong cup of coffee, so go and get it. I will wait…

Back already? well, lets start the formula magic then.

Your the production manager and have a need to schedule uneven resource across uneven requirements, how can you do that?
Well today we’ll look at Resource Allocation and Scheduling using Excel to do the hard work

Today, lets talk about indexing, a technique used to compare changes in values over time.

What is indexing?
Lets say you want to compare prices of Gold & Coffee over last few years. Gold price in 2011 (oct) is $1,655 per ounce. And now (sept 2012) it is $1,744. Like wise, Silver price in 2011 is $32.06 and in 2012 it is $33.61. How do we compare such diverse numbers?

Enter indexing.

First we need to calculate price of Gold and Silver in 2012 assuming their starting price is 100. This can be done with simple arithmetic.

Now, we can easily compare the prices. Looking at the indexed prices, we can conclude that both Gold & Silver prices have gone up by similar percentage (~5%).

Today at Formula Forensics, Guest author Sajan shows us how to extract a sorted, unique list of items, displaying the most frequently occurring items first, while restricting the output based on some additional criteria.

Moosa, one of our readers emailed this interesting question:

I have huge list of customers (around 1500).
Table includes following information
Customer # , Customer Name, Sales 2002, sales 2003, … sales 2012

My requirements are
1. list of customer who did not have sales during all these years
2. List of customer who have not business from 2003
3. List of customer who have not business from 2004

Today, lets learn how to identify all the non-performing customers.