Clearly and Simply

Category: Dashboards

  • Geographical Flow Maps in Excel (Part 1 of 3)

    Part 1 of a 3 parts series on how to create a Geographical Flow Map in Microsoft Excel

    Geographical Flow Maps in Excel - IntroA Geographical Flow Map visualizes the physical route or flow of material, people, money, information, etc. from a starting point to several endpoints.

    Flow Maps do certainly not belong to the visualization types in daily use. But it is definitely helpful to have such a template in your toolbox in case you may need it one day.

    Today’s article is the first of a 3 post series about how to create Geographical Flow Maps in Excel.

    This first part lays the foundation with a workbook setting up the data, the calculations and the chart by using standard Excel features only, i.e. no VBA. As always, all three posts will come with the according Excel workbook for free download.

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  • Filter Excel Dashboards with Table Slicers

    How to use Table Slicers as interactive Filter Controls on a Microsoft Excel Dashboard

    Filtering data by one or several criteria is certainly one of the most common and important activities in data analytics. Adding visual filters to a dashboard is a built-in feature in Tableau and Power BI and as such a walk in the park.

    But what if you need interactive filter controls on a dashboard in Microsoft Excel?

    Filter Excel Dashboards with Table Slicers Intro

    Sure, you can use data validation lists, form controls or ActiveX controls as interactive dashboard objects to set a filter or at least make a selection. You could also write some VBA code to let the user filter data by directly interacting with cell ranges or chart elements. All viable options, but either limited in functionality or a lot of effort to implement.

    Wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply use the slicers, which have become a very popular way for facilitating the filter process on Pivot Tables? In other words, wouldn’t it be nice to create a dashboard like this in Microsoft Excel?

    A Microsoft Excel dashboard with a variety of views (numbers, tables, charts), all filterable using the visual filter controls above the views (the slicers).

    You guessed it, right? It is possible. And even better: it is very simple and straight forward to implement. No VBA, no limitation to Pivot Tables or Pivot Charts, no Power Query, no DAX formulas. Just good old Excel.

    Today’s article explains the basics of the technique, describes the process of the implementation step-by-step and – as always – provides the example workbooks for free download.

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  • US Choropleth Map by County per State – a 4th Option

    Another option to display a Choropleth Map of the United States by County for one user-selected state in Microsoft Excel

    The previous post presented three different options to implement a US Choropleth Map by County per State in Microsoft Excel. One approach showed the entire map of the United States and highlighted the selected state (option 2), whereas option 3 filtered the data and only plotted the counties of the selected state.

    It was again Leonid Koyfman (who else?), who provided me with an interesting idea for another alternative: Leonid suggested in this comment to combine options 2 and 3 and show both maps in one view. This requires more real estate on the dashboard, but it also combines the advantages of both approaches: it provides a zoomed map of the selected state and keeps the context of this state on the map of the entire USA.

    Since the technique will certainly be most useful on a dashboard showing more than just the maps, I created an example visualization with two additional views:

    US Choropleth Map by County per State Dashboard - click to enlarge

    • On the left side of the dashboard the two maps (zoomed selected state and USA) are displayed
    • At top right of the visualization a table lists 10 selected counties of the current state: the 10 counties with the highest or lowest unemployment rates. A small new VBA routine assigns the according bin color to each of the 10 counties in the narrow column right to the table
    • The band chart at bottom right visualizes minimum, maximum and (unweighted) average of unemployment rates of all counties in the selected state over time

    This is just one example how the technique of visualizing maps for a user selected state could be integrated in a more complex dashboard.

    If you want to use this on your own dashboard, you may want to play around with the size of the maps and where they are located. Size and position of the zoomed state map are defined by the named range “myMapView”. You can adjust the zoomed map by simply changing the cell reference of this name. As for the map of the USA, you have to group all shapes of the US map first, then resize and reposition this group and finally ungroup it again.

    The major disadvantage remains, though: the zoomed map of the selected state makes the distortions visible. These distortions are inevitable in the process of converting SVG-files to freeform shapes in Excel. Well, at least I couldn’t find a way to avoid them. The problem depends on the size of the selected state: Texas and California, for instance, still look good as a zoomed map. Rhode Island and Connecticut definitely don’t. A crucial downside, no doubt about it. Unfortunately I do not have a solution for this. A map would be needed which will not be distorted in the ungrouping process, but I couldn’t find a better map than the one used here.

    If you are interested, here is the link to download the zipped Excel workbook:

    Download US Choropleth County Map per State (zipped Excel workbook, 2.4 MB)

    Many thanks go to Leonid for the idea.

    Stay tuned.

  • US Choropleth Map by County per State

    How to display a Choropleth Map of the United States by County for one user-selected state

    Choropleth US Map by County per State (Intro)If you are a regular reader of this blog, you certainly know that I am into geographical data visualization. Just click on “Choropleth Maps” in the Categories roll on the right side of the blog and you will see that we already had 18 (!) posts in this category. Some of them discussing maps in Tableau, but most of them dealing with the question how to implement Choropleth Maps or Cartograms in Microsoft Excel.

    I thought I would be through with this topic. I really did. However, I recently noticed that there is one common use case for Choropleth Maps in Excel I never wrote about: visualizing one user-selected region of a bigger map. Imagine you have geographical data with a hierarchy, e.g. USA by state and county (to state the obvious for the majority of my readers). It may well be that one of your dashboards is focused on displaying views for one selected state only.

    Now, what if one of your views shall be a Choropleth Map? How can you show only the selected part of a map on your dashboard?

    Today’s post describes three different options how to do this. As always, the example Excel workbooks are provided for free download without any password protection.

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  • Highlight Actions in Microsoft Excel with Multiselecting

    How to implement Highlight Actions in Microsoft Excel with the option to select more than one category (Multiselecting)

    Multiselect Highlight Actions Excel IntroClearly and Simply proudly presents another guest article: Leonid Koyfman, long-time contributor to this blog, enhances the approach to Highlight Actions in Microsoft Excel with the option to select more than one category. Leonid developed an impressively simple and elegant technique. Enjoy.

    The recent post Highlight Actions in Microsoft Excel provided a mechanism to replicate Tableau’s highlight actions in Microsoft Excel and focused on the specific use case when a selection of a row within the data table, or a bar of the “bar charts”, automatically highlighted related products on the XY scatter chart and shaded off all other data points.

    Getting closer to what can be done in Tableau, the suggested approach lacks an important Tableau functionality: multi-selection. In the Highlight Action Example in Tableau we are not limited to a single item selection. We can select multiple Sub-Categories with a mouse or CTRL-Click and this action will highlight the corresponding data points on the XY scatter chart.

    Today’s post includes a set of techniques and tricks to extend the dashboard presented in Highlight Actions in Microsoft Excel to mimic Tableau’s multiselecting feature.

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