The folks at Washington Post made an interesting chart to understand whether winning a Grammy award makes any difference to album sales. Go ahead and browse it if you have not already seen it. Go, I will wait.
Are you impressed?
I really liked this chart. This is what I liked about the chart,
- It tells a story. [why charts should tell a story]
- It is an ego chart. We would all instantly search for our favorite artists and learn about how Grammy award changed their album sales.
- It is a simple chart. No clutter, no gaudy colors, just a bunch of lines and the story is out there.
- It lets you play. You can hover your most over an artist to see their sales before and after the award, and how much % bump they got.
In fact, I liked the chart so much that I wanted to make it in Excel.
Here is what I came up with:
How does the chart work?
1. Data for the chart: The Washington Post guys did not give any details about the source of data. So I manually typed the data myself by looking at their chart. It took a few minutes. But totally worth it. I put the data in 5 columns – Year, Artist, Album, Before and After sales.
2. The chart: The chart is an XY Scatter plot. I took numbers from 0 to 37 (there is a total of 19 years of data – from 1992 to 2010. Each year has 2 data points – before and after). For even numbers I used the before sales and odd numbers I used the after sales. For this I wrote simple INDEX formula with a bit of MOD(). Again, nothing too fancy.
3. Getting the gaps in the chart:
This is the tricky part. By default, if you have 4 points (0,98000),(1,135000), (2,155000), (3, 427000) in the XY Scatter plot, Excel will draw a line connecting all 4. But we want to have a gap between first 2 points and second 2 points. How?!?
Thankfully, there is a simple workaround. You can insert blank rows between 2nd and 3rd row of your data and instantly you will see a gap in the chart. Repeat the same for remaining 18 points.
4. Year Selection & Highlighting
This is done using conditional formatting & Worksheet_SelectionChange Event Macro. First, I wrote a simple macro that would change the named range valSelectedYear to the selected year. The code is very simple. You can examine it in the download file.
Then, I used the valSelectedYear to drive the conditional formatting that would fill blue color across the column. As you can guess, the chart is transparent (ie no fill color for both chart area and plot area). So whatever color the cells beneath the chart have, they will show up in the chart too.
5. Creating the Dynamic Legend:
Here I have used picture links to fetch the artist image dynamically. (well, I was too lazy to download the actual images of Nora Jones and U2 etc. So I just used clip art).
Then, I used text boxes to make the dynamic legend, same as the technique demonstrated in smart chart legends & excel product catalog articles.
6. Formatting and aligning everything:
Once the basic setup is ready, I just moved and re-arranged the chart, legend box etc. so that everything looks right.
Download the Chart Workbook:
Click here to download the workbook in Excel 2007 format.
(click here to download the file in Excel 2003 format. I have not tested this, but it should work alright)
Mirror location for the files.
Please note that you must enable macros to select years.
Recommended Reading to make charts like these
- Picture Links – What are they and how to use them in Excel?
- Dynamic Chart Legends in Excel
- INDEX Formula – Examples, Tips & Tricks
- Conditional Formatting – Examples, Tutorials, Tips
- Further Examples,
How would you have made this chart?
I liked the original chart design and interactivity provided by Washington Post people. So I closely mimicked the same my Excel chart. But you may want to visualize the same data in a different way. So go ahead and download the workbook. It has data (hidden in columns A thru G). Play with it and make your own chart. Post them in comments.
I would love to see how you would have visualized the same information. Especially this type of data has a lot of relevance in business situations, so it would be fun to see your views and learn from each other. Go ahead and chip in.
Thanks to Washington post for the chart. Hat tip to Flowing Data for the link.
15 Responses to “Highlight Employees by Performance Rating – Conditional Formatting Challenge”
While this might solve the question Shelly asked, there is another option that might be more useful - a pivot table could make a list of people who fall into the various categories, so, if you needed to simply see who got in the top bracket to give them a bonus, you would have that list
Simply sorting by the rankings would work too, but you would knock them out of alphabetical order.
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The solution I chose makes use of the percentile formula.
The percentile formula returns the value representing the K-th percentile of a range of values. The range of values is the first criteria, and K is the second criteria in the formula.
I applied Conditional Formatting according to the formulas in the order below:
5% =$C6>=PERCENTILE($C$6:$C$33,0.95) Dark Blue
15% =$C6>=PERCENTILE($C$6:$C$33,0.85) Light Blue
65% =$C6>=PERCENTILE($C$6:$C$33,0.1) Green
10% =$C6>=PERCENTILE($C$6:$C$33,0.05) Light Red
5% =$C6<PERCENTILE($C$6:$C$33,0.05) Dark Red
The issue I noted with this approach is that Zambi was not highlighted in my solution as it is in the solution provided. Unless I am mistaken, and I very well may be, the 10th percentile for this data set is at 2.21, so Zambi would fall above the 10th percentile with a PR of 2.3.
The first step to this was figuring out the 'buckets'; what scores should fall into each range. In attempting to match the formatting of the spreadsheet, I determined the buckets below.
5% = 95% to 100%
10% = 90% up to but not including 95%
65% = 10% up to but not including 90%
10% = 5% up to but not including 10%
5% = under 5%
After that, it is a relatively simple matter to plug the necessary values into the conditional formatting formulas as shown above.
One final consideration is that while the buckets above match the color banding on the spreadsheet, I believe that the original request suggests a different color banding with 6 buckets shown below.
Top 5% = 95 to 100% Dark blue
Top 10% = 85 up to but not including 95% Light blue
Top 65% = 35 up to but not including 85% Green
Bottom 10% = 10% down to but not including 5% Light Red
Bottom 5% = 5% or under Dark Red
This leaves one final bucket of 10 to 35% (exclusive of both values) that is not highlighted and so would remain white.
Thank you Chandoo and Shelly for an interesting and useful exercise. This is certainly a valuable technique to have in my reporting bag of tricks.
Use of PERCENTILE is a smarter way of doing it. Below is my solution.
First 5 % = Apply conditional formatting (Dark Blue) as highlight ">=" =PERCENTILE(C:C,0.95)
Next 15% = Apply conditional formatting (Lighter Blue) as highlight between =PERCENTILE(C:C,0.95)-0.01 and =PERCENTILE(C:C,0.8)
Next 65% = Apply conditional formatting as highlight (Olive Green) between =PERCENTILE(C:C,0.8)-0.01 and =PERCENTILE(C:C,0.15)
Next 10% = Apply conditional formatting as highlight (Lighter Red) between =PERCENTILE(C:C,0.15)-0.01 and =PERCENTILE(C:C,0.05)
Bottom 5% = Apply conditional formatting (Red) as less than =PERCENTILE(C:C,0.05)
I agree, this is a challenge faced by HR managers every year and use of percentile formulae is the most popular solution which permits further processing like making bell curve, applying increments based on segmentation etc.
Hi Chandoo,
I came at the same solution as yours (not looking at yours first) but I have hard coded the conditions in the conditional formatting. For example:
=AND($C6>=$D$10,$C6<$D$9)
I have done the same thing 5 times for each condition. This makes the formatting independent of the order of specification. I think it will work better across versions of excel.
To copy the same thing in all sheets, Shelly can copy these formatted cells with format painter and apply it to the relevant cells in next sheet and so on! I know 700 sheets will be difficult but I dont know of any other way to apply conditional formating rules to the whole sheet.
First i have used percentile formula in the next column of "percentile Threshold" where E5, E6.. is input to colour code.
The idea behind doing this is to replicate the formula for any range and any threshold
=PERCENTILE($C$3:$C$30,1-E5)
=PERCENTILE($C$3:$C$30,1-E6)
=PERCENTILE($C$3:$C$30,1-E7)
=PERCENTILE($C$3:$C$30,1-E8)
=PERCENTILE($C$3:$C$30,1-E9)
Now i have given logic to different employee by applying "if Formula"
=+IF(J3>=$G$5,1,IF(J3>=$G$6,2,IF(J3>=$G$7,3,IF(J3>=$G$8,4,5))))
where 'J" referes to PR and "G" refers to percentile derived from above mentioned formula.
once again it is replicable (just change reference points)
Now comes the major part of Conditional Formatting, i have used "use a formula to determine which cells to be formatted"
Formula =$j=5, format "required colour" Applies to "$I$3:$J$30"
plus put tick on stop if true
This solves the query, important point that this is repeatable and can be done for n number of departments
Thanks !
I had done some reading on it and in Excel 2010 a new function has been introduced, percentile.exc. Attaching a video which also talks why the old percentile function shouldn't be used as it acts erroneous at times. Might be worth a watch Chandoo,
http://www.itechtalk.com/thread10579.html
@Deepa
Quit correct.
Where ever you use statistical spreadsheet functions and are using excel 2010 you should use the new versions of the functions as MS did a lot of work to speed up and fix errors in the old functions.
Warning: If you use the new Excel 2010 statistical functions in Named Formulas most of them will crash excel so do keep that in mind.
Hello Chandoo,
When i first read the challenge file, i thought, the color that need to be applied for a given rule, also need to be picked dynamically as given in rule set. But in the solution file, i found that color is hard Coded. So in case, someone has same data, but wants different colors, he/she needs to goto manage rules and change colors.
Let me know if my understanding is correct, and if yes, can we also make the color to be applied dynamic?
Thanks
Kishore
HI I ALSO USED THE PERCENTILE FUNCTION. HOWEVER, I WENT A STEP FURTHER AND USING THE SMALL() FUNCTION I SORTED THE DATA BY PERCENTILE SO THE COLOSCHEME WOULD BE GROUPED BASED ON THE VALUE. THIS WAY IT IS BETTER AND EASIER TO VIEW.
[...] recently posted a challenge to help a reader with a [...]
Hi, i have got doubt regarding to the percentages that has been put in chandoo's spreadsheet, i cant understadn how he put directly. can some one please explain how chandoo put the percetages straight way that i stated below..
5%
15%
60%
10%
5%
I have stumbled on this post as the solution has been already given so I have taken the liberty to record a video where I show the implementation of it as well as adding a filtering feature which I hope can prove to be useful.
Thank you
http://www.xlninja.com/2012/06/28/how-to-use-excel-to-highlight-employee-performance-rating/
[...] scriu nici macar un cuvant din urmatorul articol. Astazi mi-am citit mailul si hopa challenge de la Chandoo. Cum puteam sa refuz asa ceva si m-am apucat de citit, iar dupa 5 min i-am spus sotului ca pe asta [...]
Question for Chandoo:
I came to your site late but am totally loving these challenges 🙂
I guess it all boils down to how the bins are set up.
I agree with the PERCENTILE.INC function.
pls help me understand where I am wrong.
I have determined following the bins:
bottom 5% <=2.00 (F6:F33 <=PERCENTILE(range,.05))
lower 15% (5+10) <= 2.40 (F6:F33 <=PERCENTILE(range,.15))
lower 80% (5+10+65) <=3.46 (F6:F33 <=PERCENTILE(range,.80))
lower 95% (5+10+65+15) <=4.00 (F6:F33 =PERCENTILE(range,.95))
top 5% <=4.20 (F6:F33 <=PERCENTILE(range,1.00))
I find that only Tom is highest scorer and unique top 5% achiever.
I notice that Chandoo has included Christy and Daniel in top 5% achievers. How can there be 3 people in top 5% out of a population of 28 (5% of 28 = 1.4, i.e. only one person can achieve that status)?
I tried different ways but cannot get to that distribution.
Rest of the work is simply organizing the conditional formatting rules with Stop If True box checked.
Thanks for your insights