Clearly and Simply

Interactive Drop Lines on Microsoft Excel Charts

Display drop lines to both axis of an Excel chart after clicking on a data point

The previous post (Tableau Quick Tip #4 – Drop Lines) discussed a great interactive feature for exploring large data sets on charts: the Drop Line.

In fact I like this feature so much that I am not only using in Tableau. If the data is appropriate, I am also providing a similar feature on my Excel dashboards.

You may ask:

“Interactive Drop Lines in Excel Charts? Does Excel provide such a feature?”

Not built-in, but with a few tweaks and a small piece of VBA code, you can easily get to interactive drop or reference lines in Microsoft Excel, too.

Today’s post shows how to create interactive drop lines on Microsoft Excel charts for different chart types. As always, the article provides the Excel workbooks for free download.

Tableau Quick Tip #4 – Drop Lines

Call out positions of selected data points in your Tableau view using Drop Lines

I am barely using gridlines on my charts. In fact I didn’t even know that Tableau Software has an option to show and format gridlines. Hence I started the original introduction to this post as follows:

Unlike Microsoft Excel, Tableau Software does not provide an option to display gridlines on charts. Tableau allows you to define so called row and column dividers, but only for categorical data, i.e. dimensions.

This statement is totally wrong: Tableau offers gridlines (Format | Lines | Grid Lines) and Rich was kind enough to correct this in the first comment to this post. Thanks Rich. My fault. I apologize for the confusion.

But still: gridlines are very often nothing else than chart junk as Stephen Few points out in this excellent article: Grid Lines in Graphs are Rarely Useful. Tableau has something way more useful than gridlines: the interactive Drop Line.

Today’s short Tableau Quick Tip #4 introduces this extremely helpful interactive feature of Tableau.