This is an Excel replica of excellent Tableau visual made by Marc Reid here.
Last week, I saw a stunning visualization on Tour de France using of radial charts on twitter.
???? @Marc_DS5 combined #SportsVizSunday (Tour de France) and #SWDChallenge (radial charts) to create this #VOTD! Learn about the fastest and longest tours in history: https://t.co/Xge6mtyVYE pic.twitter.com/6luDs9Riwp
— Tableau Public (@tableaupublic) July 9, 2019
As an amateur cyclist, somewhat pro data analyst, I jumped with joy seeing that visual. I immediately thought, this needs to be redone in Excel. So here is an implementation of radial charts in Excel.
Demo of Excel Replica – TdF Distance & Pace Radial charts
Download Tour de France Radial Charts viz in Excel
Click here to download the completed workbook. Have a play with the viz tab or explore the data&calc tab to see how it’s put together.
How is this chart made?
This will be a brief recipe with links to other articles that explain the technical elements. Feel free to poke around the download file to discover odd missing elements.
Step 0: Inspiration
As mentioned earlier, the inspiration for this came from Marc Reid’s excellent visual. I loved the visual instantly and wanted to replicate it in Excel as much as possible.
Step 1: Getting data
The data for this came from Thomas Camminady’s page on Every cyclist of Tour de France in a single CSV file. As the name suggests, it’s a CSV file, so there was no post processing needed. For each year, each finisher there is one row in the data set with columns like name, team name, duration, distance, pace, position and few other bits.
Step 2: Calcs for radial visualization
Meet ometrys. You might have seen them back in high school.
- Geometry
- Trigonometry
They will help us take the cycling data and transform that in to a radial chart.
Since there is 94 years of data (between 1913 and 2017 there were 94 editions of the tour) each spoke will be separated by 2pi / 94 radians.
Let’s take a look the anatomy of radial chart spokes.
We could simply draw one line per spoke, but to get the thick edge, thin center look, I went with triangle approach.
As you can see, if we can calculate points a,b,c & d for each year, our job is done.
The center is (0,0). Points a & d lie on the inner ring. Points b & c depend on the actual distance (or pace) we are plotting for the given year.
Let’s say inner ring size (radius) is defined by a named range hole.size and triangle edges are separated by 1 degree (2pi/360 radians).
- point a (x,y) = (hole.size * SIN(theta), hole.size *COS(theta))
- point d (x,y) = (hole.size * SIN(theta + 2pi/360), hole.size *COS(theta + 2pi/360))
To calculate b & c, we need to use the distance in that year too. As the distances (and paces) are all over the places, I have used a scale.factor to scale them down or up to make the radial charts uniform. This is how the formula looks for points b & c.
- point b (x,y) = (dist/scale.factor.d * SIN(theta), dist/scale.factor.d * COS(theta))
- point c (x,y) = (dist/scale.factor.d * SIN(theta + 2pi/360), dist/scale.factor.d * COS(theta + 2pi/260))
As we need 4 points for each year, we need to calculate 4 x 94 values to plot the radial chart for distance. Similar set of values need to be calculated for pace too.
Once all these values are ready, it is a simple matter of creating XY scatter plot, formatting it to get the spokes.
This method of drawing spokes / radials in Excel is explained in great detail here. For more also see network relationships chart in Excel.
The calculations for line charts are rather straight forward, so I am not explaining them here.
Step 3: Extra series for highlighting max, min and selected values
Once the calculations are done, we can add additional x,y values for each of these scenarios.
- If the pace is maximum, then get (x,y) else (NA(), NA())
- Pace is minimum, get (x,y) else NA()
- Year is selected by the user, get (x,y) else NA()
Related: How to conditionally format charts?
Step 4: User interaction for year selection – scrollbar form control
I added a scrollbar control to the visuals area and then set it up to go from 1913 to 2017. We can use the linked cell value to drive the calculations needed for “year selection” bit.
Related: Introduction to Excel Form Controls
Step 5: Stats for selected year with Picture Link
For the selected year, we can easily calculate stats (winner’s name, duration, distance, pace and percentage changes compared to previous edition of the tour). Once these stats are calculated, we can show them on the visual by using picture link. As you play with the scrollbar, the picture link changes.
Here is a re-cap of all the 5 steps in construction.
Other bits & pieces
- We can add labels for important points on radial chart by using “value from cell” option for data labels.
- But the labels on XY charts tend to be poorly positioned. I needed more space between edge of spoke and label. To get this, I added an extra label series that is offset 12 points from the edge.
- We can add number of finishers in each year and see that trend too. As you can see, over the years, the competition has gone intense.
The final output – Tour de France distance & pace over time as radial charts
How do you like the visualization?
My love for cycling, data and story-telling coincided perfectly in this. That said, if I remove my rose-tinted glasses, I can see a couple of issues with the visualization.
- Redundancy: The line charts at bottom depict the same info as radials, but do a better job. They can work even with 500 data points, where as the radial spokes will get very busy with such large volume of data.
- Obvious: The conclusion from visualization is “as distance goes down, pace has gone up”. But this is kind of obvious.
That said, I loved the challenge of replicating it in Excel. I would say, barring the trigonometry part, it is rather simple to re-create this in Excel. I suggest giving it a try to improve your charting skills.
What about you? What do you think about the original Tableau visual and its replica in Excel? Please share your thoughts in comment section.
Do you like sport & data – Check out these stories too:
My first 200km bike ride as a dashboard
Roger Federer’s 7th Wimbledon Title – Timeline
Commonwealth Games 2018 – Medal Tally Report (Power BI)
12 Responses to “Speeding up & Optimizing Excel – Tips for Charting & Formatting [Speedy Spreadsheet Week]”
Usually when I dump data into my files to update values, the formatting sometimes go to all rows or columns. So what I typically will do is go to the last row and then the last column and use Ctrl + Shift + end and then delete the cells highlighted. this will remove all unknown formats in the worksheet. Also, after you have done this, you won't see the benefit until you save the document. Sometimes I even have to close and reopen. The direct sign that this has improved is the size of the scroll bar and range.
I have some comments on a couple of the points.
1. Camera objects
Tip: I use defined names in conjunction with camera tool objects.
Each camera object gets a name like so:
CameraItem01
Referring to: =IF(PicsOn=1,Sheet1!$C$2:$S$5,"")
By setting the PicsOn name to 1, the camera objects become "live", by setting the PicsOn name to 0, they become static. That improves performance enormously.
4: Conditional formatting
Lots of CF rules can slow down your workbook a lot. And it does not show the calc progress a "normal" recalc does on slow workbooks.
5. Format whole columns/rows
as far as I know, there is no problem with formatting entire columns/rows performance-wise, on the contrary, Excel is more efficient when you format an entire column than when you format a couple of 100 rows of a column.
6. Styles.
Here I wholeheartedly disagree. I say: Use styles. And use them religously.
I mean: if you have applied a (custom) style and you need to change a small piece of formatting to make that one cell look right, force yourself to create a new style just for that cell. It forces you to really think about your spreadsheet design and try and streamline it. It also makes it much, much easier to change your sheet's appearance later on. See http://www.jkp-ads.com/articles/styles00.asp
Very good insights Jan..
Camera objects: I often use similar technique to turn off images in my dashboards.
Formats: Thanks for clearing this. Do you think formatting larger ranges has any impact on macro speeds or it does not matter?
Styles: Thanks for telling us about this. As I mentioned, I am not sure about the styles, but I am under the impressions that excessive use of styles can bloat the file size.
@Chandoo:
If you stick to formatting entire rows/columns I don't expect macro speed is affected. Better: try it!
If you use styles properly AND as a replacement of ad-hoc cell formatting, I expect you'll see that the file actually is smaller in size.
This is because the cells now only have a reference to a single style instead of a reference to a custom cell formatting style.
Many cell formatting combinations get created if you format your cells in an ad-hoc manner, which was responsible for the dreaded "Too many different cell formats" error in Excel 2003 and older. Excel 2007 and 2010 have a higher limit there, but it does slow down your file with many of them.
Style bloat in my point of view is what you get by copying and pasting a lot from various other files and thus get Normal 1, Normal 1 1, Normal 1 1 1, ... I have seen workbooks with as many as 6000 styles, all caused by copying and pasting from various differently formatted workbooks.
Excel 2007 and 2010 have fixed a number of issues regarding copying of styles, but for workbooks with a long editing history, the trouble is already in the workbooks.
Cant emphasise the importance of reducing the amount of formatting in a workbook - this has a suprising impact on workbook size. I've always kept to one font, and no more than three colours - this has worked well for me. Keeping things clean and simple should be the motto when designing any type of report/dashboard that is going to be distributed around the organisation.
You can also save a few MB's by saving as an xlsb file.
Has anyone else mentioned that only the first item in the "more ..." section is hyperlinked.
Prem, have you confirmed by trial that XLSB file size is smaller than same XLSX file? Sorry, I just tried it with a small, simple XLSM file. I was surprised to see you are correct. File went from 40kb to 37kb. I thought that the compression of the new file would make the new file smaller.
@Ron
All Excel files have a minimum overhead that they have to include which is around 8KB, just to store a simple number or letter.
So with a small file of 40KB you will not see a huge improvement in file size
With files greater than 10MB you will see large improvements in size.
The compression gained also depends on what the contents of the file include. That is straight numbers, text and formulas can be greatly compressed whereas files that contain a lot of objects especially pictures gain very little from using *.xlsb files.
@Ron.. the other articles are yet to be published. All the links will be updated by Tuesday (27th March).
Hi,
I have a need for x,y scatter chart to have arround 30 data series.
like this:
http://i65.tinypic.com/jra8lc.jpg
Also I have multiple of such charts in one excel file.
Is there any way to make excel faster, because it is irritatingly slow?
(though my PC config. is quite on the level)
Thanks in advance!!!
@Mil
30 series won't be the issue
It is the number of points in the series
Also remove all fancy modifications, like shadows, fancy fills etc
I'd suggest asking the question in the Chandoo.org Forums http://forum.chandoo.org/
Attach a sample file with an example of what you are after
@Hui
I've already removed all fancy mod. The problem is there are also a lot of data points in one series.
Thanks for the advice!
@Mil
Do you really need every data point ?
Where is the chart being presented Screen or Report
On a screen you are unlikely to use more than 800 pixels for the chart area
So using any more than about 250 points is not adding values
On an A4 chart in landscape lets say the chart area is 6" long and at 300dpi that is 2000 pixels
Once again using more than 800-1000 points will not add any value
I have seen charts with 30,000+ points and when this is explained and a work around shown people appreciate the speed up
For a work around try setting up an area where you select say every x'th point using an Offset or Index Function
Then plot that data
I'd suggest asking the question in the Chandoo.org Forums http://forum.chandoo.org/
Attach a sample file with an example of what you are after