Elegant Dates in Line Charts

I came across this stock chart in the Kuala Lumpur’s edition of the Business Times while I was in Malaysia. The chart has an elegant treatment of dates. I have seen this sort of designs in many magazines and wanted an afternoon challenge to do this in Excel.

The exercise wasn’t very challenging after all. I managed to capture the nice features of the original chart. To create the clean horizontal date axis, I used a column with the formula “=IF(DAY(A2)=1,A2,”")”. This formula only displays a date if it is the 1st day of the month. The alternating month blocks was created with an area chart using a column of formulas like this: “=IF(MOD(MONTH(A2),2),3000,NA())”. This creates a pulse train that varies between 0 and 3000 across months.

To learn more about how to create beautiful charts like these in Excel, check out this workshop: Beautiful Excel Charts

What you need to know about VBA Programming

If you are someone who uses Microsoft Excel to generate statistics-based business reports, create forecasts or do alot of routine Excel manipulations, this is why you need to know Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).
It makes you work faster. A lot more faster.

Here are some more reasons:
1. All versions of Excel support the VBA programming language.
2. The VBA language is able to control every single aspect of Excel. You can write VBA programs to automatically perform Excel tasks on your behalf!
3. In fact, every Office application like Word, Outlook, PowerPoint can be controlled by VBA!
4. Now imagine what VBA can do for you.

Learn more about VBA programming here.

BP Oil Spill shown in a Microsoft Excel Chart

On 20 April 2010, a BP oil well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, causing the largest offshore spill in U.S. history. This Microsoft Excel line chart illustrates some key events 2 months after the explosion and BP’s stock price using a common Date horizontal axis.

The resulting chart is rich in information yet it’s not cluttered. The key relationship between stock price, event and dates are tied up using the “Lollipop Approach” described earlier.

See the full pic: BP oil spill infographic in Excel (full resolution: 792x448).

references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill. http://www.ft.com.

Lollipop approach to clarify Microsoft Excel line charts

Traditional Microsoft Excel line charts have a common problem. It is hard to visually associate the data points with the horizontal axis. The traditional axis line is no help at all.

We can get around this problem by using data markers. Certainly an improvement, but we still need to mentally drop imaginary lines between the points and the labels.

My solution is to add 100% negative error bars for each data point. This removes any ambiguity between the data points and the axis labels. I call this the “Lollipop Approach” for line charts! The error bars may add additional weight to the chart, but they serve a useful function.

In a later post, I will show you a beautiful excel chart example using this lollipop approach.

Singapore population infographic in Microsoft Excel

This is an info-graphic I created in Microsoft Excel. It shows the population composition of Singapore in 2009. The world map and the stick-man was from the standard web-ding font. The only exception was the Singapore flag which I copied from Wikipedia. Nothing fancy was used. Just pure Excel 2007 features, no more no less.

Who says Microsoft Excel is only for number crunching?

See the full pic: Singapore Population Info-graphic 1105x490.

Why IT folks hate Microsoft Excel

Yes they do. Which is why you hardly get any good support when you have a problem with it. Try opening a support ticket when you hit a snag with Excel. It won’t see the light of day.

So why do IT folks hate Microsoft Excel?

1. It’s tough for IT folks to distribute and control Microsoft Excel on your desktops. “Jim, could you upgrade/re-install my Microsoft Excel on my laptop?” You probably see Jim avoiding you for a week.

2. IT do not trust Microsoft Excel. Open up an Excel workbook, notice that you can’t trace anything back to a credible source, or who made any changes since it was created. IT folks hate it when they can’t find anyone to blame.

3. IT can’t do version control on Microsoft Excel files. Any Excel file can be copied, changed and copied again. There is no absolute version that IT can trust and rely.

So as Excel users what are we to do? The only viable way is to to take responsibility of our own Excel files. Business changes quickly, analysis is needed rapidly. We simply can’t wait for IT that is short-staffed or unresponsive.

In short, we need to know our Excel better than IT folks.

Ugly Real Economic Growth Chart from Singapore Statistics-Part 2

Quoting from my favourite marketeer Seth Godin:

The only way to succeed is to be remarkable, to be talked about

So I was really amused that Peltier Tech picked up on my past article “Ugly Real Economic Growth Chart from Singapore Statistics” and was inspired to write another. Good ideas do travel.

I made certain aesthetics changes to an original chart from Singapore Statistics.
Some modest changes and this was created:

What mirthed me was that the author proposed charts that had everything I hate about Excel charts.

He merely recoloured the original ugly chart! Compare and see for yourself.

I always wanted to combine business aesthetics and business savvy in Excel charts.
In my latest workshop Making Beautiful Excel Charts I will break all the traditional rules in Excel charting. What you get are designer-quality charting ideas with Excel.

Let me summarise some typical visual sins with a page from my new book.

That being said, I whipped up another version. Without be-labouring the point, the results are obvious for everyone to see.

Let me end this with Seth Godin’s words again:

The new Dream that markets around the world are embracing is this:

1. Be Remarkable
2. Be generous
3. Create Art
4. Make Judgement calls
5. Connect people to new ideas

and we have no choice but to reward you.

A gallery of Beautiful Charts for Microsoft Excel part 5

It’s time to share some great charts I’ve come across lately. This is part of my on-running gallery of beautiful chart designs which can be re-created in Microsoft Excel.

You can look at the whole gallery with this link: Beautiful Charts for Excel

Free Microsoft Excel 2007 VBA program. Automated IP Address Checker

As a service to the Excel user community, I’ve written a niffy little Excel VBA program. This program checks a valid IP address and it returns Country, City and Organization information in seconds!

Download AEternus IP Address Checker

See how it works:

Screen Shot:


Disclaimer:
Aeternus is not responsible for any loss or damage arising from the use of this free program. Source codes are provided “as is”. To ensure that this program is free from maliciouse codes, make sure you obtain this program direct from Aeternus’s website.

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.

Insurance

% of fraudulent insurance claims.
% of overdue premium.
Number of new insurance policies.

Investment

Return on Equity (ROE).
Internal Rate Of Return (IRR).
Net present value (NPV).

Information Technology

% of network bandwith used.
Number of SLA breaches due to poor performance.
% of virus incidents.

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