Excel Pivot Chart Drill down buttons are a new feature available in Excel 2016. You’ll find them in the bottom right of your Pivot Chart. They’re available whenever you have more than one field in the Axis area of the Pivot Chart (which is the Rows area of your PivotTable). You can see below that […]

Sometimes a secondary axis is a necessary evil. After all, most of the time you can’t plot big numbers and little numbers in the same chart without the little numbers getting lost in the scale. For example, let’s say we want to plot our annual sales and profit margins in one chart. Here’s the data: […]

One of the cool features of Power BI is the ability to cross filter and highlight charts. With a simple click on a column or line in one chart we can instantly highlight the selected item in all other charts and tables in our report. In the animated image below you can see that when […]

New in Excel 2016 (for Office 365 subscription users only*) are Map Charts. *If you have Office 365 and can’t see the Map Charts then it’s likely you’re on the Deferred Channel, which hasn’t received them yet. You can check information about all channel releases for Office 365 client applications here. Download the workbook Enter […]

Survey data can be tricky to display in a chart so in this post I’m going to give you some options. Let’s start by looking at what you shouldn’t do, and that is a 100% stacked bar chart like this: The above chart plots the 15 questions on the vertical axis and the responses colour […]

Excel Heat maps can speed up interpretation of data and focus the reader’s attention to problem or key areas. And we can create them easily using Conditional Formatting. To be fair it’s less of a map and more a heat table, but nonetheless they’re referred to as heat maps. Let’s take this example of student […]

Slopegraphs were first introduced by Edward Tufte in his book, The visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983) where he referred to them as Table Graphics. The more catchy term, “Slopegraphs”, came much later. Slopegraphs are useful for comparing change over time. For example, the Slopegraph below shows the change in long-term health conditions from 2001 […]

I was reading a health magazine last week and the chart below caught my eye. click image to enlarge (sorry about the quality, it’s a photo of the magazine and photography is not my ‘thing’ 😉 ) × There’s something fundamentally wrong with this chart. Can you see what it is? Overall the layout is […]

PivotTables are a great way to summarise your data, but PivotCharts can be a pain in the, um, neck. PivotChart Restrictions They’re not as customisable as a regular Excel chart They only play nice with data from one PivotTable If you spend considerable time formatting them they’re likely to remove all your hard work when […]