All articles with 'Excel Tips' Tag

In Petal Charts – an Alternative to Radar Charts I have suggested using a radar chart tweak to replace the radar charts. Both PTSBlog and Information Ocean have posted their critical reviews of these petal charts. So as a penance for proposing petals, I am going to provide a tutorial on creating a comparison table […]

What a Monday it is. Most of the us woke up to find that whatever we have been accumulating for the last few years in investment gains has been wiped out (BSE Sensex at 2 year low, Dow slips below 10000). Not a very pleasant way to start the week, but then may be this […]

Here is a quick excel number formatting tip. If you ever want to format numbers in such a way that it shows decimal values only if the number is less than 1 you can use conditional custom cell formatting (do not confuse with conditional formatting). Here is an example: In such cases you can use […]

Time for sharing another round of excel related articles around the web. List of all data visualization and analysis excel add-ins, The list includes some of the really useful add-ins. Handy bookmark if you work with data visualization alot and need to know where to find good stuff to add to your excel capabilities. Designing […]

In shuffling a list of items in excel I have described the technique of using random numbers generated by RAND() to sort a list of items. The technique had one disadvantage though, every time you need to reshuffle the list you have to press F9 to recalculate the rand() and then go to menu > […]

There are few charts in excel that are as revolting as a radar chart. The purpose of a radar chart is to compare m options across n parameters so that audience can be convinced that option A is better than say option B. But, I am yet to come across a radar chart that tells […]

We have a major power outage in Ohio due to a wind storm on Sunday. AEP, Our electric provider says that power would be restored to my area by this Friday midnight, that is almost 6 days without power. I will not be able to blog regularly during this period. So here is a list […]

This is 4th part of Creating Management Dashboards in Microsoft Excel 6 post series by Robert. This 6 Part Tutorial on Management Dashboards Teaches YOU: Creating a Scrollable List View in Dashboard Add Ability to Sort on Any KPI to the Dashboard Highlight KPIs Based on Percentile Add Microcharts to KPI Dashboards Compare 2 KPIs […]

With each passing day the amount of information contained in a single spreadsheet, slide, document is growing. Thanks to demanding bosses, clients and colleagues, we are now supposed to provide all the relevant information in as much less space as possible. This is where micro charting or light weight data exploration has become a rage. […]

Creating KPI Dashboards in Microsoft Excel is a series of 6 posts by Robert from Munich, Germany. This 6 Part Tutorial on KPI Dashboards Teaches YOU: Creating a Scrollable List View in Dashboard Add Ability to Sort on Any KPI to the Dashboard Highlight KPIs Based on Percentile Add Microcharts to KPI Dashboards Compare 2 […]

Creating KPI Dashboards in Microsoft Excel is a series of 6 posts by Robert from Munich, Germany. This 6 Part Tutorial on KPI Dashboards Teaches YOU: Creating a Scrollable List View in Dashboard Add Ability to Sort on Any KPI to the Dashboard Highlight KPIs Based on Percentile Add Microcharts to KPI Dashboards Compare 2 […]

Creating KPI Dashboards in Microsoft Excel is a series of 6 posts by Robert. This 6 Part Tutorial on KPI Dashboards Teaches YOU: Creating a Scrollable List View in Dashboard Add Ability to Sort on Any KPI to the Dashboard Highlight KPIs Based on Percentile Add Microcharts to KPI Dashboards Compare 2 KPIs in the […]

The other day my wife told me that we dream about a total of 6 years in our life, an average of 2 hours for everyday you sleep. [Source: wikipedia on dreams]. That is almost as much time as you would work in 30 years (30*50*40/24/365, assuming you work 40 hours a week for 50 […]

If your reports include hourly distribution of data like, Customer footfalls in your store Page views of your site Customer service calls to your toll free numbers here is an interesting charting idea to show the data around the clock (literally) Update: Visualization pros Jon Peltier and Jorge Camoes took a critical look at this, […]

If you ever had to simulate random outcomes in excel sheet, you might have already heard of about the spreadsheet function rand(), this little function generates a random fraction between 0 and 1 whenever you use it. So I usually write =round(rand()*12,0)int(rand()*12)+1 if I need a random number between 0 to 12. Of course, if […]