First let me give you some excuses for not posting regularly.
Last month has been very hectic due to sudden travel to Sweden from Chennai. I could hardly manage a handful of posts. Moving to a new place meant I could find very little time to respond to reader mail. I am sorry if you have sent me an email and didn’t get a response. Thankfully, I have managed to carve out a new posting schedule since last week and I will be sticking to 3-4 posts per week going forward.
Now time for some good news. Our twitter follower base has grown to 3 digits. Yes, R1C1, PHD’s twitter presence has a hundred followers. If you are in to birds or micro-blogging you should probably follow me over there.
Moving on to this week’s excel links,
Using various shades to depict uncertainty in predictions
In a fine charting tutorial, Peltier teaches us how to show uncertainty in predictions using shaded lines. Even though I have never seen charts like this before, I think this is one of the coolest ways to use area charts. Go check it out for yourself.
Dick shares with us 3 techniques to lookup in 2 columns at a time. I prefer using either vlookup with helper column in the beginning or index with helper column in the end.
Spreadsheet Barbecue Grill, Really!!!
Finally a barbecue grill that looks like a spreadsheet. No comments.
NodeXL – Visualizing Large Social Network’s Data in Excel
NodeXL is an excel 2007 template for visualizing social networks. It is a collaboration between Microsoft Research, University of Maryland, Telligent Systems, Cornell, University of Washington. The project has several cool visualizations and comes handy when you need to visualize a large network of data (for eg. hierarchical relationships in a large, complex organization)
Questioning Data to Ink Ratio(opens a PDF)
In this beautiful and insightful newsletter, Stephen Few questions the “data to ink ratio” and suggests that we must raise our voice (ie use more ink) if needed.
Excel Dashboard and Visualization Bootcamp
Jon Peltier and Mike Alexander (of DataPig Technologies) are conducting a Excel dashboard and visualization bootcamp between May 20 and 22. It is in Frisco, Texas. If your job involves considerable amount of dashboard creation and visualization, you might want to attend a workshop like this and sharpen your skills.
Do you want to share a cool excel or charting related link ?
If so, drop a comment or send us the details at chandoo . d @ gmail. com. Emails from readers like you make me very happy.
Have a great week everyone 🙂
2 Responses
Is there any other tool like NodeXL that works from Excel 2003? it looks just what im looking for, but im tied with 2003.
@Rodrigo, I am not aware of any tools that can do this. But may be you can check with NodeXL folks and findout if the tool can be made backward compatible. Unless they are using some very specific excel 2007 features, it should be fairly straight forward.
btw, let me know if you come across any tools / addins for excel 2003 that can do this.