Do it in Excel: Ring charts are better Pie charts
Pie charts are a circular chart divided into sectors, illustrating proportion. I remembered learning them when I was in primary school. Apparently it was invented by this person called William Playfair in 1801.
An ancient pie chart showing the proportions of the Turkish Empire in different regions.
Pie charts are simple to understand but rather limited because:
1. Can only show a single data series.
2. Can only show limited slices else it becomes cluttered.
Here is a clever twist by using ring charts instead. The following chart was created in Microsoft Excel.
The awesomeness of this beautiful ring chart are:
1. Shows multiple series data instead of just one data series. I’ve taken advantage of this property by showing aggregated revenue data in the outer ring. The inner ring shows a detailed breakdown of monthly revenues.
2. Presents multiple slices of information without being overly cluttered. This needs a careful use of colours though.
To create this ring chart in Microsoft Excel, use this data format.
To learn more about how to create beautiful charts like these in Microsoft Excel, check out this workshop: Beautiful Excel Charts
If you can measure it, you can definitely dashboard it!
Dashboards can be used to show important KPIs (key performance indicators) for all sorts of industries and work processes. If you can measure it, you can definitely dashboard it! I’ve made a short list of useful KPIs along with the relevant industries. With a bit of imagination & Microsoft Excel techniques you can create endless variations of dashboards.
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% of fraudulent insurance claims.
% of overdue premium.
Number of new insurance policies.
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Return on Equity (ROE).
Internal Rate Of Return (IRR).
Net present value (NPV).
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% of network bandwith used.
Number of SLA breaches due to poor performance.
% of virus incidents.
Learn more about our Excel training workshop: Creating Dashboards in Excel.
PowerUp Workshop: Making Beautiful Excel Charts
What if you could turn a drabby Excel chart:
into something like these?
For many Excel users, there is a need to produce clear, concise and even attractive charts in Excel without using expensive software. What is lacking are the clear techniques to do so. Compelled by this need, AEternus has designed a wokshop to show participants how to achieve this objective.
The Workshop Outline:
- A collection of Formatting Chart Techniques.
- Demonstration of each technique to achieve beautiful results.
- How to replicate a Wall Street Journal chart.
- How to replicate a Economist Magazine chart.
- How to replicate a New York Times chart (read why this chart is beautiful?).
- Reverse-engineer other beautiful charts.
To learn more about how to create beautiful charts like these in Excel, check out this workshop: Beautiful Excel Charts
Create Executive Dashboards in Excel
Most analysts know how to create charts in Excel. Getting them to look good is another matter. It’s hard to imagine you can create magazine quality dashboards like these without dedicated software.
Charts like these ARE done in Excel. Excel has been overlooked as a platform to deliver dashboard reports simply because the techniques are not obvious or well known.
This 2 day workshop program is aimed at imparting the skills to create amazing charts and dashboards for your management audience. Design dashboards to show company operations at a glance to your board or investors.
Heavy coverage will be given on the concept and the practical methods of creating dashboards so that participants are immediately productive when they return to work.
More Dashboarding Ideas:
• You can place them in your routine emails, upload it to the web, publish it to SharePoint servers, put them in PowerPoint presentations. Spread your message. Reach out to those who needs to know!
• It can be done in Excel, so why not experiment? It’s cheap and risk free. Don’t wait for management to decide. Bring new dashboard projects to your management.
• Everyone has the same tools. Why not compete with each other to come up with the best dashboard designs?
Learn more about Creating Dashboards in Excel.
