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All articles with 'visualizations' Tag

How your country did in Commonwealth Games – Power BI Viz and Tutorial

Published on Apr 17, 2018 in Power BI, Power Pivot, Power Query
How your country did in Commonwealth Games – Power BI Viz and Tutorial

Commonwealth games 2018 have ended in the weekend. Let’s take a look at the games data thru Power BI to understand how various countries performed.

Here is my viz online or you can see a snapshot above.

Looks good, isn’t it? Well, read on to know how it is put together.

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A simple trick to make your dashboards user friendly [video]

Whenever you have a dashboard that is quite long or spans across multiple worksheet tabs, it can be hard to use. Here is a simple trick to make your dashboards user friendly. If your dashboard has form controls, create duplicate sets of them and place them in locations where users are looking. For example, If your […]

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A better chart to visualize “Best places to live” – Top 100 cities comparison Excel chart

Recently, I saw this chart on Economist website.

It is trying to depict how various cities rank on livability index and how they compare to previous ranking (2014 vs 2009).

Best cities to live - Chart from Economist.com

As you can see, this chart is not the best way to visualize “Best places to live”.

Few reasons why,

  • The segregated views (blue, gray & red) make it hard to look for a specific city or region
  • The zig-zag lines look good, but incredibly hard to understand % changes (or absolute changes)
  • Labels are all over the place, thus making data interpretation hard.
  • Some points have no labels (or ambiguous labels) leading to further confusion.

After examining the chart long & hard, I got thinking.

Its no fun criticizing someones work. Creating a better chart from this data, now thats awesome.

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How the tax burden has changed over the years – Excellent chart by NYTimes & Redoing it in Excel

Published on Dec 6, 2012 in Charts and Graphs

If I need some charting inspiration, I always visit New York Times. Their interactive visualizations are some of the best you can find anywhere. Clear, beautifully crafted and powerful. Long time readers of Chandoo.org knew that I like to learn from visualizations in NY Times & redo them using Excel.

Today let me present you one such chart. This is based on an interactive visualization prepared by NY Times explaining how the tax burden has changed over years for various income groups.

Take a look at tax burden chart – Excel implementation
Tax burden over years chart - recreated in Excel

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

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Growing a Money Mustache using Excel [for fun]

Published on Aug 22, 2012 in Charts and Graphs, Learn Excel
Growing a Money Mustache using Excel [for fun]

Mustache and Excel?!? Sounds as unlikely as 3D pie charts & Peltier. But I have a story to tell. So grab a cup of coffee and follow me.

Today, lets talk about how to construct a dynamic chart that can show us how much progress we have made against a financial goal (in this case, accumulating a big chunk of money). I call this growing mustache chart, inspired from the wonderful Mr. Money Mustache.

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Excel Salary Survey Dashboards – Choose the winner [poll]

Published on Aug 3, 2012 in Cool Infographics & Data Visualizations
Excel Salary Survey Dashboards – Choose the winner [poll]

Recently, we published 66 dashboards visualizing Excel salaries around the world. Each of the contestants have put in great effort and hand-crafted these beauties. Now its time we picked a winner.

How does the voting work?

The voting has 2 components

  1. Readers (that is you) pick a winner and runner-up using online voting.
  2. Judges (2 of them) will also pick winners. Judges vote carries 20% weight.
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How to make Box plots in Excel [Dashboard Essentials]

Published on Jul 31, 2012 in Charts and Graphs
How to make Box plots in Excel [Dashboard Essentials]

Whenever we deal with large amounts of data, one of the goals for analysis is, How is this data distributed?

This is where a Box plot can help. According to Wikipedia, a box plot is a convenient way of graphically depicting groups of numerical data through their five-number summaries: the smallest observation (sample minimum), lower quartile (Q1), median (Q2), upper quartile (Q3), and largest observation (sample maximum)

Today, let us learn how to create a box plot using MS Excel. You can also download the example workbook to play with static & interactive versions of box plots.

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Analyzing 20,000 Comments

Analyzing 20,000 Comments

On 14th July, evening 4:51 PM (GMT), Chandoo.org received its 20,000th comment. 20,000!
The lucky commenter was Ishav Arora, who chimed, “Like super computers…Excel is a super calculator!!!!” in our recent poll.

It took us 8 years & 15 days since the very first comment to get here. And it took just 1 year 7 months & 23 days to add the last 10,000 comments (we had our 10,000th comment on 21st November, 2010).

Out of curiosity, I wanted to understand more about these 20,000 comments. So I downloaded our comment database, dumped it in Excel and start analyzing.

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Creating a Masterchef Style Clock in Excel [for fun]

Creating a Masterchef Style Clock in Excel [for fun]

Jo (wife) likes to watch Masterchef Australia, a cooking reality show every night. Even though I do not find contestant’s culinary combats comforting, occasionally I just sit and watch. You see, I like food.

The basic premise of the program is who cooks best in given time. To tell people how much time is left, they use a clock that indicates how much time is left (much like a stop clock, with a small twist).

One day, while watching such intense battle, my mind went

It be cool to make such a clock using hmm… Excel?

While I cannot share my snapper (or pretty much any other food item) with you, I can share my Masterchef style Excel clock with you. So behold,

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Adding Macros & Final Touches to Customer Service Dashboard [Part 4 of 4]

Published on Apr 26, 2012 in Charts and Graphs, VBA Macros
Adding Macros & Final Touches to Customer Service Dashboard [Part 4 of 4]

Welcome back. In final part of Making a Customer Service Dashboard using Excel let us learn how to add macros & VBA code that makes our dashboard interactive.

As you can see, there are 2 important macros in this dashboard.

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Making Small Multiples in Excel [Charting Technique]

Published on Nov 16, 2011 in Charts and Graphs
Making Small Multiples in Excel [Charting Technique]

Today, lets learn how to create small-multiples (or panel charts) to visualize trend of 2 product lines over years in various regions. The inspiration for this chart and article came from my friend, Paresh‘s recent article on his blog.

See how you can create a combination of area & line chart to create the small-multiple chart and clone it. You can also download the workbook and play with it to understand this technique better.

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Sales Analysis Charts in Excel – 78 Alternatives

Published on Jun 30, 2011 in Charts and Graphs, Excel Challenges, Learn Excel
Sales Analysis Charts in Excel – 78 Alternatives

Recently, I ran a contest asking you to analyze a bunch of sales data and present your results in charts. We received a total of 78 charts from 45 people. The contest entries had a mind-boggling variety of excel charts, techniques and ideas. It took me a while to go thru all the files and compile the results. Thanks for your patience. In this post, you can find all the charts along with my comments & links to download files.

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Excel Teens are out to get you & Other findings from our Survey

Published on Feb 25, 2011 in Charts and Graphs
Excel Teens are out to get you & Other findings from our Survey

Our of curiosity and fun I asked you “how long have you been using Excel?”. I was overwhelmed by the response we got to this simple question. More than 437 people responded with their comments, stories and enthusiastic responses. Thank you so much.

It would taken me more time to make the charts and understand the data. But thanks to Hui, who volunteered to tabulate all the survey data in a simple CSV.

Shown above is a chart I came up with based on the data. Read the rest of the post to understand the survey results and view more charts. Also, you can download the excel workbooks and original data set to play.

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How would you Visualize World Education Ranking Data [Homework + Video]

Published on Dec 20, 2010 in Charts and Graphs
How would you Visualize World Education Ranking Data [Homework + Video]

Here is a charting challenge to begin your Christmas week. Recently Guardian’s Data Blog released World Education Rankings data and a sample visualization. Now your challenge is to make your chart visualizing World Education Rankings data.

You can see the chart I have constructed above. Read the rest of the post to find out how I made this chart and download the workbook.

Post your submissions using comments.

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How to cook a delicious dynamic chart that will have your boss drool

Published on Aug 31, 2010 in Charts and Graphs, Featured
How to cook a delicious dynamic chart that will have your boss drool

Dynamic charts are like my favorite food, Mangoes. They tempt, tease and taste awesomely. In this post, we are going to learn how to create a dynamic chart using check boxes and formulas as shown in the animation aside. Are you ready for some excel chart cooking?

You can also download a FREE Dynamic chart template from the post. So go ahead and make your boss drool.

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