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.
Stacked Bar/Column Chart with Indicator Arrows – Advanced
Lets take last weeks Stacked Bar/Column Chart and add some high-performance steroids.
Sara’s Copy Shop – Break even analysis and what-if modeling in Excel [Videos]
Last week, I asked you to share an analysis problem that you couldn’t solve in Excel. We got quite a few very interesting problems in comments and email. In this post, let me explain how to solve Sara’s copy shop problem using Excel.
What is Sara’s copy shop problem?
Thanks to Caroline who posted this problem.
Sara wants to open a copy shop. Each copier costs $5,000 per year to lease. The rent & other fixed costs per month are $300. There is a $0.02 variable cost per copy. Each copier can print up to 100,000 copies per year. She plans to charge $0.11 per copy from her customers. Sara estimates that the demand can be any of the 4 values – 500, 1000, 1500 or 2000 copies per day.
- Build a model to estimate profit per given number of copiers & demand values
- Find the mix of copiers & demand values that can make maximum profit for Sara (copiers – 1 to 6, demand – 500 to 2000)
Stacked Bar and Indicator Arrow Chart – Tutorial
Learn how to develop a Stacked Bar chart with Indicator Arrow in this Tutorial
Tell me about an analysis problem that you couldn’t solve with Excel?
Time for a quick show & tell.
Tell me about an analysis problem that you couldn’t solve with Excel?
It can be because you didn’t know how to solve the problem or Excel isn’t the tool for it or any other reason.
Go ahead and speak up. Post your tricky analysis problems in the comments section.
PSA: Don’t let auto correct spoil your party
So here is a news from strange but true department. Microsoft Excel blamed for gene study errors [bbc.com].
Microsoft’s Excel has been blamed for errors in academic papers on genomics.
Researchers trying to raise awareness of the issue claim that the spreadsheet software automatically converts the names of certain genes into dates.
Gene symbols like SEPT2 (Septin 2) were found to be altered to “September 2”.
Aah, classic!
This is what happens when you spend countless hours learning genome sequencing and very little about the software tools where your data goes. May be we need clippy back to warn people about such sticky situations.
Weekend open mic – Share your one hand Excel shortcuts
At Chandoo.org, we are big believers of keyboard shortcuts. There are several posts (1,2,3,4, more and even more) discussing useful Excel shortcuts. Today I want to introduce a new kind of keyboard shortcuts. One hand shortcuts.
One hand shortcuts – Half the work, double the fun
The idea is simple. When you can use only one hand to complete the shortcut key presses, it is called as a one hand shortcut.