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Excel Burn Down and Burn Up Charts are easy to make with line or scatter charts. If you’re familiar with Agile Project Management, then you’ll know that these charts are useful for monitoring the progress of a project against expectations. While the terminology is specific to Agile Project Management, the concept is relevant to managing …
Excel WeePeople font charts enable you to build interesting variations on waffle, bar and column charts, to name a few. They’re great for visualising demographic data, survey data and more. The free WeePeople font, courtesy of ProPublica, consists of 20 different people silhouettes hand drawn by Alberto Cairo. The last 6 letters of the alphabet …
One of the things that makes Excel stand apart from other reporting tools is its immense flexibility. With some tinkering you can make charts and graphics that don’t look anything like Excel. In this post I’m going to take you through the steps to create Excel dot map charts. And while there’s no built in …
In this post I'll be looking at ways to highlight or label values that may be of special interest in visuals. Perhaps you are interested in seeing the minimum and maximum values, or some data points of significance like when your business held a promotion. Or you might want to highlight points that fall within …
If you are going to use animation in your charts, you should do it to enhance the story your data is telling. Famous examples of this are the presentations made by Hans Rosling. So the animation will be useful if it shows in a meaningful way how the data changes over time. In this post …
Managing projects or tasks can be improved with a visual representation of progress and milestones. Thankfully, an Excel project management dashboard like the one below is relatively easy to build, requiring no programming or add-ins. Download Workbook Download the Excel file containing the Excel project management dashboard and step by step instructions. Enter your email …
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 …
You might want to save your charts as images that can then be used in other applications, like email or displayed on a website. Selecting a single image then copying/pasting or saving it, isn't too much bother. But if you want to do that for several images it quickly becomes tiresome. I've written some VBA, …
Using interactive Excel charts in your dashboards and reports allows the user to pick and choose what they want to see. This means you only have to build the report once and then the user can easily create their own view instead of you having to create multiple permutations of the same report, customised for …
With Office 2016 officially launching on September 22, 2015 I thought I’d give you a sneak peek at a few of the new charts in Excel 2016. Treemap Chart A Treemap chart is an area based visualisation that displays your data in a hierarchical pattern. The tree branches are represented by rectangles, with sub-branches displayed …
Today I’d like to share with you a video tutorial by Isaac Gottlieb on supply-chain decision making from his book Next Generation Excel. Isaac teaches over 2,000 MBA students a year at Columbia, NYU and Temple U and over 3,000 undergrads on-line. See how he uses the Solver to find out the ideal location for …
