All articles with 'ideas' Tag

My Olympic medals by country year visualization in excel is received well by readers. I got few interesting emails on it. Robert from Germany shares an interesting approach at doing this, by doing a heat map of the medal counts on an outline world map. This is very impressive and involves flood filling countries with […]

I use google suggest to get new post ideas, I start out by typing “what is”, “who is”, “how to”, “when is”, “where is”, “excel” and see all the suggestions Google comes up with. If I see something interesting I would mark the search topic and use it for posting here. And for the last […]

Next time you want to make a chart to tell how your sales (defects, customer calls, page views, number of clicks, walk-ins etc.) are doing over a period of time, consider showing them in a min-max chart. For eg. a min-max sales chart for the last 12 months tells average, minimum and maximum sales per […]

Time for another week of ogling at cool visualizations. What a week it has been for the chart makers 😉 Super cool visualization of 2008 Box office collection This is an area chart modified to indicate how a movie has performed everyweek, thus the movie markers go down (except for dark knight) after 1-2 weeks […]

Dashboards are daily staple for some of us who need to report status to our bosses, present them in weekly meetings or generally CC half the world with what is up on our end. There are several ways in which you can spice up the dashboard, one of the simple things to do is, to […]

When I saw the Olympic medals won by each country by year infographic on nytimes my jaw almost dropped, go ahead see it and come back, I am sure you will love it too. It is one of the coolest visualizations I have seen in the recent past and I see infographics all the time, […]

On Saturday we went to Columbus zoo, apart from enjoying the lions, penguins, birds, I have also learned 5 simple yet effective lessons in visualization. 1. Design your charts for kids – assume your audience knew bare minimum and curious Above shown is a typical Zoo-mate info dashboard that you can see next to any […]

How can you ensure that your blog post, term report or business case is readable without spending a lot of time getting beta reviews from others? Thanks to google docs, you can do that with one click. Just upload your word document / txt file to google docs. Once inside, goto menu > tools > […]

Passion, excitement, inspiration or love – whatever you choose to call it, is the key reason we do remarkable things. Take a minute break here, think about the most significant moments in your life. What is common in all of those moments? I am sure your answer will be Passion or excitement, love, inspiration. I […]

Amul has one hell of a branding strategy, they take whatever is happening in politics, entertainment, sports etc and turn the situation in to a billboard to tell their butter / jam / milk product story. Almost every week they do this, so restlessly that when something big happens, customers tend to think how Amul […]

Who said Excel takes lot of time / steps do something? Here is a list of 15 incredibly fun things you can do to your spreadsheets and each takes no more than 5 seconds to do. Happy Friday 🙂 1. Change the shape / color of cell comments Just select the cell comment, go to […]

Time for another round of cool charting / info-graphic ideas around the web. Most Popular Baby Names – all the way from 1880 Nametrends is a cool website totally dedicated to analyzing and showing baby name trends. They have pretty interesting stuff like, how baby names ending with -lie (charlie, willie, ellie etc.) fared from […]

RSS feeds are everywhere. So much that you cannot avoid them in your data processing, analytics or day to day spreadsheet needs. If you can get the RSS feeds to excel sheet you can do pretty interesting things with it, like: Prepare a sheet to watch deals on Amazon, Craigslist, Deals2buy and other favorite sites […]

Wow, this is totally cool. A great lesson in creating buzz. The folks at windows vista wanted to convince people that Vista is indeed a good operating system and upgradable from XP. But there are lot of bad opinions floating around and end users are more or less confused about it. Personally I have rarely […]

Here is a quick round up of excel posts from few of the awe some blogs around the web: At PTS Blog, Jon provides excellent tutorial on adding target lines to your bar charts to show target vs. actual performance. He has several other tweaks for your category axis as well, just read the other […]