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

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

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.

Components of the USA deficit in the last decade from TIME magazine.

Follow these steps to create your own American Deficit chart in Microsoft Excel.
1. Go to the U.S. Bureau of Public Debt portal to extract the data set.

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np

2. Punch in a start and end date. The portal will generate a list of figures.
3. Select and copy the data set from the web page.
4. In Microsoft Excel, paste the figures as Unicode else it will not work properly. Click in Microsoft Excel: Home Ribbon->Paste->Paste Special->Unicode.
5. Plot out the figures as an Excel chart.

A data treasure trove of Singapore

Totally free for everyone, you can see data sets from Finance, Health, Education,Manpower ministries, Monetary Authority of Singapore among many others. This is excellent news for app developers looking for reliable public data to use!

A good design to use when you need a list in Excel.

See pic below. With careful layout of columns and rows, this form can be replicated in Excel.

Arrows,icons and text makes this form easy to use.

See pic below. A simple design that can be created with cell coloring in Excel.

2-tone gray colour scheme that is easy on the eye.

A happy looking form

I loved this form because:

It makes me wonder why HR forms always seems more complicated and tedious than they actually are? Human resource folks please take a good look at this!

Here’s another beautiful form example.

Microsoft Excel 2007 downloadable form templates

Sadly, few of them inspires me enough to take them seriously. While all of them are functional, none of them looked good. This is a typical ugly example:

A boring entry form in Excel

I feel that entry forms in Microsoft Excel doesn’t have to be all clinical in boring blues and black. Why not inspire your users with good ideas like brighter colours and eye-freindly layouts. Think deeper into the entry process that makes business sense like highlighting useful instructions and highlight error entries. Think of creative ways to cut out the weariness of repeative entries.

There are many hard copy examples I can find which can be translated into Excel! Here are some. I will create a new blog section devoted to this topic. Do check in regularly.

An example of a beautifully instructive form.

This is a creative entry form. I'm sure it can be done in Excel!

Tornado chart in Excel

Below was my original version in a previous post.

Click to see full version.

In many ways, it is a better version compared to mine. The tight Excel chart was able to show with clarity specific election results between the People’s Action Party with the various opposition in all 26 constituencies. The colour used in the chart was in sync with the chart title which enhanced clarity. The best part of this chart was at a glance, it could tell which side was the clear winner, and when studied in detail each row was a blow by blow account of the election results.

Down load a full size version below.

Click to see the full pic:

Download an animated powerpoint version here.