Impress with Tornado Charts in Excel

tornado chart in Excel

It’s tornado season. Don’t freak out, I am talking about Excel tornado charts. Use them to visualize age and gender-wise KPIs. Here is a quick demo of interactive tornado chart made in Excel. Watch it and read on to learn how to make your own tornado in a spreadsheet.

Source vs. Use of Funds – 14 charting alternatives

11-buttery-fly-chart

Let’s say you manage a fund or charity. You get money from various places and you use that money for various reasons. How do you tell the story of source vs. uses of funds? In this post, let’s review 14 charting options. Source vs. Use of funds – Sample Data for this problem Let’s say […]

Designing awesome financial metrics dashboard [tutorial]

In this amazing guest post, the winner of our 2016 dashboard contest – Chandeep – Explains how he constructed the jaw dropping beauty (shown above) using Excel, creativity, love and sweat. Grab a full cup of coffee (or whatever liquid fancies you) and read on. Take lots of notes and play with the ideas in Excel while reading to maximize your learning.

Thanks Chandeep.

Excel Links – Getting used to life in Windy Wellington Edition

So we moved to Wellington, New Zealand few weeks back (on 17th of July 2016, to be precise). After spending first 3 weeks in Jeff’s house and a hotel, we moved in to our rental home over the weekend (on 6th of August). Around the same time, the worst of Wellington winter waved welcome to us. We quickly learned how to stay warm indoors (layers, hot water bottles, rugs and more layers). Kids started going to school few days back and they are loving it. I bought a bike and managed to go out on few rides on the hilly roads of Wellington and found a strange for sale sign too.

For sale: Pony poo and pine cones

Anyhow, Since we didn’t have internet connection until today, I thought I will start by sharing a few Excel links with you. Check them out to get your fix of spreadsheets.

Read on…

Use Advances vs. Declines chart to understand change in values

Lets say you are responsible for sales of 100s of products (which belong to handful of categories). You are looking at sales of each product in last month & this month. And you want to understand whether sales are improving or declining by category. How would you do it?

Turns out, this is not a difficult problem. In fact, this question is asked every day & answered using Advances vs. Declines chart.

You may have seen this chart in financial newspapers or websites. Shown above, Advances vs. Declines chart tells us how many items have advanced & how many have declined.

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