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.
Modelling Inventory Run Rate & Cash Flows using Excel
Imagine you run an office furniture company. You want to stop reordering two brands of furniture – Relaxer (a type of chair) and Boca Top (a type of table). You currently have 20,000 Relaxer chairs and 5,000 Boca Tops. These are valued at $200,000 and $100,000 respectively. When sold, they will yield $100,000 and $25,000 gross profit. You are hoping to sell them off in 2 or 3 years. You forecast that we can sell off these as per some yearly schedule.
You need to analyze this and prepare a cash flow model.
Let’s learn how to answer such open ended questions using various analysis techniques in Excel.
Sand Pendulums – Lissajous Patterns in Excel
Few days ago, I saw a beautiful homemade science experiment on Sand Pendulums on Bruce Yeany‘s YouTube channel. Go ahead and check it out. It is a cool project to do with your kids.
I will try this experiment with kids during school term holidays around Easter. But first, I wanted to try the simulation in Excel.
Simulating sand pendulum pattern in Excel
Take a look at the final simulation above. This is what we will create in Excel.
Mapping Spread of Obesity [Chart Critique and Alternatives]
Over at Flowing Data, Nathan has published an interesting visualization about spread of obesity.
While the above chart is quite interesting, it doesn’t offer much insight in to the data. There are a few drawbacks,
- Understanding obesity trends for a given state over the years is hard due to the layout and format of the chart.
- Finding which states are experiencing most obesity growth rates is not possible
- Ironically, the chart itself is obese. It takes too much space to explain the data.
Nevertheless, the chart looks cool and can be reused with smaller data-sets (quarterly trends or just for a few years). So let’s recreate the same in Excel. While we are at it, let’s also build an alternative visualization to explore the obesity data.
Visualizing target vs. actual progress – Biker on a hill chart
Over the years, we have discussed a whole heap of techniques to visualize budget vs. actual charts. Today let’s take a ride on this slope again and learn another fun, silly & awesome way to depict target vs. actual progress.
Introducing biker on a hill chart
Tada!!!
Biker on a hill!?! Don’t worry, I didn’t fall down on a descent and lose my brain. I am talking about an Excel chart to visualize target vs. actual progress on a time line with biker on a hill analogy. See the above chart, you will know.
Looks interesting? Read on to learn how to create this in Excel.
Earth Venus cosmic dance – Animated chart in Excel
Recently I saw an interesting Earth Venus cosmic dance video on Facebook. See the original video below or here.
Although this is not entirely accurate from physics & astronomy perspectives, the dance is a stunning example of patterns that are generated by simple things.
I wanted to recreate this cosmic dance in Excel. How else am I to get my spreadsheet fix on a Saturday?
Here is a quick demo of the final outcome. Read on to learn more about the Earth Venus cosmic dance.
Tell all versions of truth [Dashboard Best Practice]
Here is a simple but effective rule for your next dashboard. Tell all versions of truth. All versions? But there is only one version no? Of course, there is only one version of truth (or data), but you can present that in different ways, thus creating different perspectives, offering different insights. By using an interactive element (slicers […]