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Excel Waffle Charts are a popular way to visually display parts to a whole. You can think of them as an alternative to pie and doughnut charts. Waffle charts are better at displaying small segments that often get lost in a pie chart. However, that doesn’t mean you should get carried away with the number …
When you have data that spans a long period of time that you want to plot in a chart, the dates in the horizontal axis in a line or scatter chart can get very cluttered. With this clever workaround that Jim Fitch shared with me we can trick Excel into showing data correctly spaced over …
If you use a scatter plot for a dataset that has discrete values in one dimension, for example your x-axis shows the days of the week, you can get points overlapping when you plot the data. To make the chart easier to interpret you can introduce jitter to the data points. This means moving the …
When you plot multiple series in a chart the labels can end up overlapping other data. A solution to this is to use custom Excel chart label positions assigned to a ghost series. For example, in the Actual vs Target chart below, only the Actual columns have labels and it doesn’t matter whether they’re aligned …
We can use a data validation list or a Slicer to lookup pictures in Excel. This ability to lookup pictures is handy for returning images of products, employees, logos etc. The only limit is your imagination. In this example I’m going to lookup pictures of the Tour de France stage profiles*. *Source 2013 Tour de …
One of the cool features in Power BI is the ability to cross highlight from one chart to another by clicking on a column in one chart and instantly highlight the selected item in another, as shown below: We can also cross highlight Excel charts in almost the same way and without the need for …
If you need to plot data that has one variable where values can be the same or very similar, for example the age of a group of people, you'll likely end up with data points that are plotted over the top of each other. To make this type of plot easier to read and allow …
Reduce clutter in busy line charts by plotting your data in small multiple charts, or panel charts as they’re sometimes known. I’ve used a few tricks for building small multiples in the past, but the Excel small multiple charts I’m going to cover in this tutorial are dead easy. It’s all in the layout of …
Labeling charts is useful if the reader needs to know the exact value for each point. We can position labels left, right, above, below or overlaid (centred) on the line. However, when you overlay line chart labels it typically looks messy, as you can see below: This is easily solved with some formatting to achieve …
Often, you’ll find Actual vs Target charts based on categorical data in the form of a column chart, however they’re slow to read. Thankfully we can make a big improvement in how quick and easy they are to read with a few simple changes. Watch the Video Download Workbook Enter your email address below …
