For Excel dashboards and powerpoint slide designs. Beautiful, imaginative, futuristic interfaces from Corning Glass.
This video from Corning Glass shows some cool concept technologies. Take a look at the beautiful and interactive computer interface designs. I can see some good ideas for dashboard designs and PowerPoint slides.
Some screen shots here:
I could use this as interesting shapes in my powerpoint slides.
Seems to work well in PowerPoint:
I took the idea and composed it on a PowerPoint slide.
More screen shots from the video:
This could look good in a PowerPoint presentation!
More screen shots from the video:
This definately looks good in a Dashboard.
Excel Line Charts with Elegant Dates
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.
A neat horizontal axis by using only a single month label for each month
It uses alternating blocks in the plot area to indicate passing months.
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
Singapore population infographic in Microsoft Excel
No fancy features. It's purely done in Microsoft Excel 2007!
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.
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:
- Be Remarkable
- Be generous
- Create Art
- Make Judgement calls
- Connect people to new ideas
and we have no choice but to reward you.
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.
Ugly Real Economic Growth Chart from Singapore Statistics.
Singapore Statistics have the most amazing numbers on Singapore. Anything on our country’s GDP to how many handphones we have on average can be found. But the folks from SingStats seriously need to improve their charts.
Take a look here (http://www.singstat.gov.sg/stats/charts/econ.html#econA)
I could hardly make any sense out of these charts. They seems to be just thrown together with out any theme or purpose. After all the work of collecting the data, if you can’t present data in a useful manner, it’s simply a waste of efforts.
I took up the challenge to clean up this miserable chart using Excel, and try to show that beautiful charts can be useful to convery data in a clearer manner.
The improvements I made:
1. The distinct shape of our total economy is much clearer as an area chart.
2. The Manufacturing and Financial sectors are reduced to scatter chart with drop lines. The trends can still be discerned yet is less noisy compared to the original version.
A 10 year Balance Sheet Dashboard
Imagine you are the new CFO. You took over the position in the new firm and you want to look at the firm’s latest balance sheet.
You’ll probably want to see the firm’s 10 year balance sheet history. It will be tough to make sense of things. What if you have a balance sheet dashboard instead? It contains the latest information complete with a 10 year history of each balance sheet line item! That’s truly a powerful tool in the hands of a competent accountant!
Klipfolio, a beautiful dashboard software. Free!
I have always been a fan of Klipfolio (http://www.klipfolio.com). This tiny software features beautifully made dashboards that run on your desktop. It’s useful and very clever. Download it, try it. It’s a low risk way to see how dashboards can work and it’s FREE!
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A crappy chart from the Straits Times. GIC looking to Asia, emerging markets
I’m going to take a potshot at the Straits Times on a chart I saw in the Money Section.
The chart was trying to compare GIC’s (Government of Singapore Investment Corporation) current asset mix to last year’s asset mix. It gave me an absolute headache. This is my list of grouses:
- Weak title. What does “ASSET MIX” really mean? There is plenty of space to say “Investment Asset Mix of GIC. 2009 vs 2008″. Without a clear title, I had to spend time trying to understand the numbers to know what this entire graphic was about.
- Confusing colours. Apparently, there was an unspecified “colour meaning” that I had to interpret. Not only I had to mentally process the pie charts, I had to decipher the colour codes from the list. By then, I had lost the overall message of the graphic.
- Numbers are all over the place. Why separate the numbers to the extreme sides of the graphic? My eyes had to swing from side to side to make meaning out of it. They should have been placed close together.
- Too many numbers. 50% of the numbers in the list were not involved in the pie charts. So why list them out? It dilutes the strength of the charts. Make them smaller or simply don’t use it.
This would be my version of the graphic done in Excel 2007.
Things I have done:
- Avoided pie charts. Our eyes judge lengths much better than angles.
- Labeled the data series and provided values right into the chart. Hence lists and even charts axis are not needed. This creates a more compact graphic.
- Added commentary to give the chart a purpose and message.
This is my version of the data without the chart:
Ministry of Manpower Unemployment Dashboard in Excel
MOM’s website (www.mom.gov.sg) contains a wealth of labor data. An example is on unemployment rates in Singapore. I took two sets of data: Unemployment Rate (Seasonally Adjusted) & Resident Long-Term Unemployment Rate (Non-Seasonally Adjusted).
They look like this. As individual charts, they may not present a strong overall picture.
Ministry of Manpower Unemployment charts
I redesigned the presentation into a dashboard using Excel 2003. You can download a copy here: Excel Productivity Cafe Files.
The effect of a well designed dashboard is you are able to survey more data in a glance, and make quicker assessments for faster decisions. I did this dashboard in 20mins, you can do it too.
Learn more about Creating Dashboards in Excel.
