Clearly and Simply

Excel Oddity: Camera Objects bloat File Size

Camera objects (aka linked pictures to cell ranges) can considerably increase the size of an Excel workbook. Why?

Camera Objects (aka linked pictures) are an easy-to-use, powerful and flexible technique in Excel, especially for making dynamic and interactive charts and dashboards.

I learned this technique years ago from Charley Kyd’s fantastic e-book Dashboard Reporting With Excel.

My good friend and Excel MVP Chandoo also wrote several articles about the Camera Object (all articles with 'camera tool' tag on chandoo.org).

The feature may still not be as known among Excel users as it should be, but there are so many very good tutorials available that I do not need to write another one.

As great as they are, Camera Objects always had a few issues (printing, merged cells, distorting captured charts, etc.) as Charley points out here: A New Excel 2010 Camera Tool Bug, and a Workaround.

Today’s article will describe not a real bug, more an Excel oddity or annoyance regarding Camera Objects: the extensive use of Camera Objects can let the file size of your workbook explode, especially if they are linked to cells with inserted images sitting on top. I took a closer look into this and today’s post describes what I found out.

Highlighting on Excel Dashboards

Highlight one selected item across all charts and views of an Excel Dashboard: an example and the how-to

Very often, a dimension is displayed on more than one view of a dashboard.

Let’s say you want to analyze data of the European Union. Chances are that you will have the dimension “member state” on more than one of your charts.

If you pull these charts together into one dashboard, highlighting a selected member state across all charts is very helpful to explore and analyze the data. It supports the user to easily focus on the selected state and to identify its position in the context of all members at a glance.

Highlighting is the very simple act of selecting one item out of many (by e.g. clicking) and automatically seeing this item emphasized in all views across the entire dashboard. This is a very effective and user-friendly visualization technique and should be available on every interactive dashboard.

Today’s post shows how to implement highlighting on an Excel dashboard. As always, including the Excel workbook for free download.

Word Clouds with Tableau

How to create Word Clouds with Tableau and a look at the value of Word Clouds for serious Business Data Analysis

The previous two posts (Word Clouds with Microsoft Excel and The Implementation of Word Clouds with Excel) provided and explained my VBA-based solution to create dynamic Word Clouds (aka Tag Clouds) in Microsoft Excel.

Unlike Excel, Tableau provides a native feature to create Word Clouds with a few mouse clicks. The feature is available since Tableau version 8, but not everybody is aware of this, because Word Clouds aren’t displayed if you click the Show Me button (Tableau’s “chart gallery”).

That’s why I want to complete my short series on Word Clouds with a step-by-step description of how to create this type of view in Tableau and two tips to make Word Clouds more effective.

However, I am up to something more: Word Clouds are a nice little visualization and come in handy if you want to draw someone’s attention to your presentation or infographic. Having said that, they are more or less useless if you need your data to answer your questions or tell your story. The second part of today’s post will try to prove that there are much better visualizations for serious data analysis than a Word Cloud.

The Implementation of Word Clouds with Excel

Approach, algorithm, VBA code and performance optimization of the Word Cloud with Excel implementation

The previous post Word Clouds with Microsoft Excel introduced another workaround to create a word or tag cloud in a standalone Microsoft Excel workbook.

The article briefly describes the approach, the user-defined settings, the result and the drawbacks of the workaround. It also provides 3 different versions of the workbook for free download.

Today’s follow-up article will have a closer look into the machine room: some more details on the approach, the data structure, the algorithm, the implementation in VBA and a dirty little trick to optimize the performance of the code for inserting and formatting freeform shapes on a worksheet using VBA.

As a little bonus, today’s post also includes a tiny Excel tool to easily split continuous texts into a list of words and their count, i.e. the data structure needed for the word cloud workaround. Of course the tool is provided for free download.