Google officially announces 10 billion app downloads in Excel
As an Android fan, I am happy to learn that the Android Market has surpassed 10 billion downloads. I found this pretty looking 3D column chart.
I have never been convinced that 3D charts are good enough for serious business use. But this chart made me think again. The exponential growth trend jumped at me. Critical milestones were highlighted in rounded textboxes which were freindly to my eyes. I’m not interested in the specifics but I got the strong message that Android is growing strongly from the chart.
I recreated this chart in Excel using a 3D column chart type.
Use the following Excel 3D Rotation settings and with the right colours, this chart can be done quite easily.
To learn more about how to create beautiful charts like these in Microsoft Excel, check out this workshop: Beautiful Excel Charts
From the Global Financial Crisis to Microsoft Excel VBA.
Thomas Friedman, NY Times columist.
What he wrote were stuff I learned during the Asian crisis. Jobs were scarce during those years. Competition was tough. University graduates working in coffeeshops made the news. Like what Friedman wrote “employers are finding it easier, cheaper and more necessary than ever to replace labor with machines, computers, robots and talented foreign workers… Good jobs do exist, but they require more education or technical skills.”
I remembered back then, I had the job of automating business reporting with Excel VBA and my colleagues feared that I was taking their work away. Reading these recent events was both nostalgic and foreboding. It is more important than ever before to come up with better ideas, learn more and improve how we work with IT. The rest of the world is increasingly impatient for you to be remarkable.
Learn more about Microsoft Excel VBA programming here.
Making Beautiful Excel Charts is Simple
Have you ever told yourself that creating great looking Excel charts is hard? Well it’s not. You only need to understand the only reason we create charts is to aid comprehension of a trend. Once you understand this, you can start to create charts that’s easier to read and understand than text!
First, this is not a good way to design effective charts. There is unneccesary clutter with too many colours, complex font and a legend that needs mental processing by the reader.
There is unneccesary clutter with too many colours, complex font and a legend that needs mental processing by the reader.
The basic way to create beautiful and effective charts in Excel is to remove everything that is superfluous. I took this idea to the extreme and designed a minimalist chart with the same data. By removing clutter, clarity is enhanced!
A cleaner font was used, simple colours and data labels made the chart much easier to read and understand.
To learn more about how to create beautiful charts like these in Excel, check out this workshop: Beautiful Excel Charts
About Microsoft Excel 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 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.
To learn more about how to create beautiful charts like these in 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
8 Microsoft Excel Chart Formatting Tips
I will demonstrate the following chart formatting tips starting from Microsoft Excel 2003.
1. Remove plot area colours and borders.
2. Remove any vertical grid-lines.
3. Change horizontal grid-line color from black to a very light shade of gray.
4. Adjust chart series colours to get better contrast, remove series borders.
5. Increase data visibility by removing legends and setting axis to a light gray or remove axis lines if it is not needed.
6. Adjust font scaling if it too big and distracting. Choose a light gray font if the axis labels are too prominent.
7. Remove chart area background colours and borders.
8. Use cells around the chart to implement more flexible titles and comments colours. Cells can be coloured to add more flexible backgrounds.
These are simple things you can do to enhance your Excel charts. Turn Now turn these simple tips into powerful tools to communicate your data and business insights.
You can turn your Excel charts into full blown, beautifully designed diagrams in your annual reports, not with a publisher but with your very own staff.
Place it on a SharePoint site to communicate information to your colleagues worldwide; put in the web so that it can be seen on an iPhone. With a bit of imagination, the options are endless. You don’t have to be stuck doing the same things over and over again.
To learn more about how to create beautiful charts like these in Excel, check out this workshop: Beautiful Excel Charts I was surfing the web and came across this chart from the New York Times. My attention was totally captivated by this intricate chart. It says that healthy food are getting more expensive while junk foods are getting cheaper! What’s noteworthy about this chart is that the designer didn’t simply just plot the line charts. That’s way too easy and lazy. Instead, he added detailed titles, notes and foot notes around the chart. He used great colour combinations to make the individual line charts appear calm & coordinated. He highlighted the individual data series to add clarity. And he did all this within a few inches of space! The result is a compact chart that tells a reader so much an entire article was brought to life by this tiny picture. I wondered how many of us out there pay so much attention and effort to our charts? You probably say “I don’t do this because its not worth the trouble”. Well, you missed out a perfect chance to be remarkable to your colleagues and management. You say “Its impossible to do this chart.” Here’s one I did in Excel 2003: You say “I don’t know how”. We’ll teach you here. Any more excuses not to be great? To learn more about how to create beautiful charts like these in Excel, check out this workshop: Beautiful Excel Charts 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.
A New York Times Chart in Excel
Ministry of Manpower Unemployment Dashboard in Excel
