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All articles with 'dynamic charts' Tag

How to create a Then vs. Now interactive chart in Excel?

Published on Aug 6, 2013 in Charts and Graphs
How to create a Then vs. Now interactive chart in Excel?

You have been there before.

Trying to compare last year numbers with this year, or last quarter with this quarter.

Today, let us learn how to create an interactive to chart to understand then vs. now.

Demo of Then vs. Now interactive chart

First, take a look the completed chart below. This is what you will be creating.

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Are you ready for 2,000 miles, 15 days & 10 Excel tips road trip?

Published on Jun 24, 2013 in Charts and Graphs, personal
Are you ready for 2,000 miles, 15 days & 10 Excel tips road trip?

Finally my Excel classes in USA are over. It was a lot of fun traveling to new cities, teaching Excel & dashboards to enthusiastic crowds and making new friends. As if that is not fun enough, we (Jo, kids & I) are going on a 2,000 mile, 2 week road trip starting today.

Although I am enjoying all this, I also feel bad for not taking enough time to share new tricks, ideas & techniques with you here. So, I have a wacky, wild & awesome plan for you. Join us on our road trip.

That is right. You can join me on our road trip and see what I see, learn some pretty cool Excel tricks, all while sipping coffee and stretching legs in the comfort of your office cubicle.

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How to create an Interactive Chart in Excel? [Tutorial]

Published on Apr 23, 2013 in Charts and Graphs, Excel Howtos
How to create an Interactive Chart in Excel? [Tutorial]

Imagine you have a worksheet with lots of charts. And you want to make it look awesome & clean.

Solution?

Simple, create an interactive chart so that your users can pick one of many charts and see them.

Today let us understand how to create an interactive chart using Excel.

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How to create interactive calendar to highlight events & appointments [Tutorial]

Published on Apr 9, 2013 in Charts and Graphs, Learn Excel, VBA Macros
How to create interactive calendar to highlight events & appointments [Tutorial]

One of the popular uses of Excel is to maintain a list of events, appointments or other calendar related stuff. While Excel shines easily when you want to log this data, it has no quick way to visualize this information. But we can use little creativity, conditional formatting, few formulas & 3 lines of VBA code to create a slick, interactive calendar in Excel. Today, lets understand how to do this.

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There is an Easter egg in this chart!

Published on Mar 27, 2013 in Charts and Graphs
There is an Easter egg in this chart!

Do not worry, you are not time traveling or seeing things. Its just that, this year I have decided to publish our Easter Egg a few days early.

And oh, I have 3 reasons for it:

  1. 2 of my favorite festivals – Easter & Holi (a festival of colors, celebrated in India) are this week. Holi is today (Wednesday) & Easter on Sunday.
  2. My kids are super excited about Holi as this is the first time they will be playing it. So we have family time from today until Wednesday and I do not feel like writing a blog entry on Friday 🙂
  3. I like to have 3 reasons for everything.

Hence the Easter Egg is advanced a few days. But it is just as fun (or may be better) as previous Easter eggs.

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Designing a dashboard to track Employee vacations [case study]

Published on Jan 24, 2013 in Charts and Graphs, Learn Excel
Designing a dashboard to track Employee vacations [case study]

Employee Vacation Dashboard & Tracker using Excel

HR managers & department heads always ask, “So what is the vacation pattern of our employees? What is our average absent rate?”

Today lets tackle that question and learn how to create a dashboard to monitor employee vacations.

What do HR Managers need? (end user needs)

There are 2 aspects tracking vacations.

1. Data entry for vacations taken by employees
2. Status dashboard to summarize vacation data

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Monitoring Monthly Service Levels using Excel Charts [Example]

Published on Dec 20, 2012 in Charts and Graphs
Monitoring Monthly Service Levels using Excel Charts [Example]

Recently, I wrote a tutorial on tax burden in USA chart.

Jared, One of our readers liked this chart very much. Jared works as a workforce scheduler and has data similar to our chart. So he applied the same technique to analyze monthly service levels for last 7 years & sent me the file so that I can share it with all of you.

First take a look at the demo of Jared’s chart. And read on to know how this works.

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Highlight best week & month in a trend chart [tutorials]

Published on Dec 12, 2012 in Charts and Graphs
Highlight best week & month in a trend chart [tutorials]

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.

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How the tax burden has changed over the years – Excellent chart by NYTimes & Redoing it in Excel

Published on Dec 6, 2012 in Charts and Graphs

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
Tax burden over years chart - recreated in Excel

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

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Happy Diwali [Animated Chart inside]

Published on Nov 13, 2012 in Charts and Graphs, VBA Macros
Happy Diwali [Animated Chart inside]

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.

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Journey of Hurricane Sandy – Animated Excel Chart

Published on Oct 31, 2012 in Charts and Graphs, VBA Macros
Journey of Hurricane Sandy – Animated Excel Chart

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.

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Interactive Pivot Table Calendar & Chart in Excel!

Published on Sep 12, 2012 in Charts and Graphs, Excel Howtos, VBA Macros
Interactive Pivot Table Calendar & Chart in Excel!

Can we make a calendar using Pivot Tables?!? Of course we can. Today let us learn a simple technique to create calendar style reports using Pivot tables. Thanks to Rob for inspiration Before making any progress, let me thank Rob from PowerPivotPro for the inspiration. Recently he wrote an article explaining how to use PowerPivot […]

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Growing a Money Mustache using Excel [for fun]

Published on Aug 22, 2012 in Charts and Graphs, Learn Excel
Growing a Money Mustache using Excel [for fun]

Mustache and Excel?!? Sounds as unlikely as 3D pie charts & Peltier. But I have a story to tell. So grab a cup of coffee and follow me.

Today, lets talk about how to construct a dynamic chart that can show us how much progress we have made against a financial goal (in this case, accumulating a big chunk of money). I call this growing mustache chart, inspired from the wonderful Mr. Money Mustache.

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One race, Every medalist ever – Interactive Excel Visualization

One race, Every medalist ever – Interactive Excel Visualization

During London 2012 Olympics, Usain Bolt reached the 100mts finish line faster than anyone in just 9.63 seconds. Most of us would be still reading this paragraph before Mr. Bolt finished the race.

To put this in perspective, NY Times created a highly entertaining interactive visualization. Go ahead and check it out. I am sure you will love it.

So I wanted to create something similar in Excel. And here is what I came up with.

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Making your dashboards interactive [Dashboard Essentials]

Published on Aug 2, 2012 in Charts and Graphs, Excel Howtos, Learn Excel
Making your dashboards interactive [Dashboard Essentials]

Everyone likes to be in control. Even my 2 year old daughter jumps with joy when she lays her hands on TV remote. She pushes the buttons and assumes it is working. It is another story that we rarely watch TV at home.

By adding an element of control, we can make our dashboard reports fun. Interactive elements like form controls, slicers etc. invite users to play with your dashboard, get involved and understand data by asking questions. That is why I recommend making dashboards interactive.

Today lets understand how you can make dashboards interactive.

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