Beautiful Budget vs. Actual chart to make your boss love you
Call them by any name – Budget vs. Actual, Target vs. Actual, Goal vs. Progress, KPIs, Performance charts, but they are the bread and butter of business charting. So how about a drop dead gorgeous and insightful chart for your next meeting with the folks upstairs? Something like above.
Read on to learn how to create this chart in Excel.
VLOOKUP that fat table with ease [3 quick tips]
Time for some good, old fashioned VLOOKUP love. Let’s say you are writing VLOOKUP()s to get data from an unusually fat table, ie one with heaps of columns. You want to get to lookup ID in first column and get thingamajig in what is that column number. Well, better get counting from 1 and after 19 seconds and lots of squinting you arrive at column number 53 – which has thingamajig.
If this sounds like your VLOOKUP routine, check out these three amazingly simple tips to save some time and effort with your lookups.
Lookup most frequent item [Homework]
Here is an interesting problem to keep your brain cells fight boredom on this Friday & weekend.
Let’s say you have some data like above.
And you want to know, for a given customer name (in cell G4),
- What is the most frequent quantity?
- What is the most often purchased item?
How would you write formulas to get these answers?
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.
An odd lookup problem [Formulas]
Let’s say you have some employee data in employee name, manager name format. But the data is all in one column, with odd rows containing employee names & even rows containing manager names. Something like above.
And you want to find out who is the boss for a given employee. Say, “Andrea Nichols”.
Your regular MATCH() formula for Andrea over the data range returns wrong answer as it will find first occurrence of Andrea (which in this case happens to be on even row, hence a manager record).
So how would you write the lookup formula?
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.
Analyzing 300,000 calls for help [case study]
Over the weekend, I got an email from Mr. E, one of my students. Mr. E works at a police department in California and as part of his work, he was looking at calls received by police. Whenever police get a call for help, multiple teams can respond to the call and go to the location. All of these dispatches are recorded. So a single call can have several such dispatches. And Mr. E wanted to findout which team responded the first. The problem?
Finding the first responded team is tricky.
Today let’s take up this problem as a case study and understand various methods to solve it. We are going to learn about writing better lookups, pivot tables, power pivot and optimization. Put on your helmets, cause this is going to be mind blowingly awesome.