All articles with 'no-nl' Tag

This is part two of our three part series on how to analyze half a million customer complaints. Read part 1 here.

Analyzing Regional Trends

As introduced in part 1, our complaints dataset has geographical information too. We know the state & zip code for each complaint. Please note that zip codes are partial or missing for a 10% of the data.

In this article, let’s explore three ways to analyze regional trends.

1. Regional trends by state, product & issue
2. Complaints per million by state
3. Complaints by zip code

How would you analyze data when you have lots of it? That is the inspiration for this series.

Let’s meet our data – Finance Industry Consumer Complaints

As part of open data initiatives, US government & Consumer Financial Protection Bureau maintain a list of all consumer complaints made against financial institutions (banks, credit unions etc.) You can download this data from the catalog page here. I have obtained the data on 1st of February, 2016. The download has 513,824 records. Each row contains one complaint.

In this and next two parts of the series, we are going to analyze these half a million complaints to find insights.

A big, warm & pleasant hello to you.

I wish you a merry Christmas & Happy New Year 2016. May your holidays be filled with joy, togetherness, celebrations and fulfillment. May your new year be filled with hope, energy and awesomeness.

I want to tell you how thankful I am for all your support in this year. Every time you visit our website, read an article, leave a comment, enroll in a course, purchase a product, read one of my books, listen to a podcast episode, watch a video or tell your friends about Chandoo.org, I feel nothing but gratitude, thankfulness and amazement. 2015 is the most successful year since starting Chandoo.org, all thanks to you. Heartfelt thanks to you, from my family, staff and volunteers.

Here is a quick but challenging homework problem for you.

Let’s say you have two dates – Start and End.

And you want to find out how many Mondays are there between those two dates (including the start & end dates).

What formula would give the answer?

Please post your formulas / VBA functions / DAX measures in the comments section.

Today is a school holiday for kids. So we (Jo & I) are taking them to zoo for a day of walking, picnic and family time. Before I rush, I want to share two quick announcements with you.

KPI contest winners:

Thanks for everyone who participated in our recent KPI data visualization contest. Each and everyone who made the final list is a winner in my book. You have creativity, passion and a sense of sharing.

After reviewing all the entries and considering our judge’s opinions, here are the winners:

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This is going to be epic!!! In the 50th session of Chandoo.org podcast, we have 50 Excel tips to make you awesome.

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

• Thank you message
• Fifty tips in 5 buckets
  • Shortcuts & Productivity
  • Formulas
  • Managing Data
  • Charts
  • Using Excel better

Hello all, prepare to be amazed! Here are 43 creative, fun & informative ways to visualize KPI data.

About a month ago, I asked you to visualize KPI data. We received 65 entries for this contest. After carefully reviewing the entries, our panel of judges have discarded 22 of them due to poor charting choices, errors or just plain data dumps. We are left with 43 amazing entries, each creatively analyzed the data and presented results in a powerful way.

How to read this post?

This is a fairly large post. If you are reading this in email or news-reader, it may not look properly. Click here to read it on chandoo.org.

1. Each entry is shown in a box with the contestant’s name on top. Entries are shown in alphabetical order of contestant’s name.
2. You can see a snapshot of the entry and more thumbnails below.
3. The thumb-nails are click-able, so that you can enlarge and see the details.
4. You can download the contest entry workbook, see & play with the files.
5. You can read my comments at the bottom.
6. At the bottom of this post, you can find a list of key charting & dashboard design techniques. Go thru them to learn how to create similar reports at work.

Thank you

Thank you very much for all the participants in this contest. I have thoroughly enjoyed exploring your work & learned a lot from them. I am sure you had fun creating these too.

So go ahead and enjoy the entries.

Today is Diwali, the festival of lights. I wish you and your family a happy, bright and prosperous festive time. May your house shower with lots of light, laughter and love.

Diwali is one of my favorite festivals. It is a time when all family members get together, eat delicious food, laugh to hearts content and light up diyas (small oil lamps) to celebrate the victory of good over evil. This year, my kids (who are 6 yrs btw) are very excited about the festival. They are looking forward to lighting up diyas and crackers (fire works).

To celebrate the holiday, I made something for you.

An animated flower pot firework in Excel.

Imagine you are the head of training department at ACME Inc. You arrange training programs round the year to empower your team. It is hard work, coordinating between employees, trainers, department heads, venues and coffee machines. What if there is something to help you keep track of all this? I am not talking about getting you a shiny new iPad, you silly. I am talking about a tracker & calendar built in Excel that ties everything together (well, almost everything, you still have to fill the coffee machine.)

We are going to build a training program tracker & calendar using Excel.

Last night I asked members of our Chandoo.org facebook page to share an Excel problem you are struggling with.  Francis asked,

How to save a file as .txt in vba without quotes? When I save as .txt, the file has got quotes inside of it. I used the code Print, but it didnt work because the file loses its delimitation.
Does anyone know how to solve this?

Let’s understand how to save a range as text and overcome the double quote problem.

Here is a quick visualization challenge for you.

There are 25 KPIs and each has a base value, current month, corresponding month values. The KPIs also have targets.

The data looks like this:

Download the data:

Click here to download the data for this contest.

Rules for this contest:

• Visualize this data using one Excel chart (one chart per KPI is ok too).
• You may omit any any data
• You can use interactive charts.
• Do not use add-ins or VBA to make your charts

Go ahead and make your chart(s).

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In the 46th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s talk about gantt charts and project plans.

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

• A brief intro to Excel 2016
• What is a Gantt chart?
• How Gantt charts can help us?
• How to create Gantt charts in Excel
  • Using bar charts with invisible series
  • Using conditional formatting and formulas
  • Using ready-made templates
• Resources on Gantt charts & project planning
• Conclusions

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In the 44th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s talk about failures.

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

• Book announcement about Dashboards for Excel
• Story of my first ever dashboard
• Important lessons – Requirement Analysis for dashboards
• Resources for creating awesome dashboards
  • Podcasts
  • Books
  • Courses

We know that column charts are excellent for presenting information. But what if some of the columns are too tall and hijacking the rest. In a previous article, we discussed few of the approaches. Today let’s learn how to build a cropped chart (broken y-axis chart) using Excel, something like above.

Looks interesting? Read on.

I have an exciting announcement to share with you. My first ever print book – Dashboards for Excel, co-authored with Jordan Goldmeier is releasing on 15th September.

Dashboards for Excel – what is it?

As the name suggests this book is a handy guide for anyone preparing dashboards, management reports and business intelligence workbooks using Excel. The key benefits are,

• Learn the visualization tools, charts, tables, and graphs important to management.
• Understand what management doesn’t want to see in a report
• Turn around dashboards faster and cheaper than ever before
• Understand the key role dashboards play in an organization
• Analyze real-world dashboards to apply important features to your own organization
• Utilize understated, but powerful, Excel formulas and VBA code
• Avoid common pitfalls in Excel development and dashboard creation
• Get started with the Excel data model, PowerPivot, and Power Query

As you can see, this is an advanced Excel book with lots of examples, case studies and practical tips.