Clearly and Simply

An Alternative to the Bar Chart Race

An alternative solution to the controversial animated Bar Chart Races in Microsoft Excel

1,276 words, ~ 6.5 minutes read

The other day, I watched an as interesting as entertaining dispute between Andy Kirk and Andy Cotgreave about the popular Bar Chart Races: Data Viz Debate: Is the bar chart race more than just a gimmick?

Although I truly admire Andy Kirk’s work, I am with Andy Cotgreave, here. I wouldn’t go so far to call them the “fidget spinners of data visualization”, but I find them hard to follow, especially when the speed of the animation is too fast.

Last week, Philip Treacy of MyOnlineTrainingHub published a post and a workbook, how to do a Bar Chart Race in Microsoft Excel. Philip visualized the 2019/2020 Premier League results in an animated Bar Chart. I am a big fan of Mynda and Philip’s MyOnlineTrainingHub, which is definitely one of the best Excel websites worldwide.

This made me think. Although I love Philip’s work, I am not a fan of the Bar Chart Race. So, how would I approach this? Today’s post provides my solution of an alternative for animated Bar Charts. As always, the post comes with the Excel workbook for free download.

A practical Example for Dynamic Storyboards

A more practical use case for Dynamic Storyboards in Excel: support the Animation of 2-dimensional data by showing the years before and after the current year on a Storyboard

717 words, ~3.5 minutes read

The previous post Dynamic Storyboards in Excel showed how to create small multiples (or panel or trellis charts) for 2-dimensional data in a sequence and let the user decide dynamically, how many small multiples shall be displayed. To describe the technique, the article used a kind of funny, but pointless data set: a part of an episode of the Italian cartoon series La Linea.

Well, creating a dynamically sized comic strip in Excel is a funny little example. But what’s the point here?

Here's the point: a Dynamic Storyboard may well be worth considering for a more serious dashboard, too. For instance, a Dynamic Storyboard may support a chart which displays the data for the periods one by one in an animation. The Storyboard can be very useful by showing the data in the context of a user-defined number of years before and after the current period. This can help to better understand the development of the data over time or to discover patterns.

Today’s post will show how a Dynamic Storyboard may support an animated chart using the example of the Gapminder Replica in Microsoft Excel, published here back in 2014. As usual, the article comes with the workbook for free download.

Dynamic Storyboards in Excel

How to create a Dynamic Storyboard of Small Charts (similar to Small Multiples, Panel or Trellis charts) in Microsoft Excel

812 words, ~4 minutes read

The article Motion Chart Excel Template used a small sequence of an episode of the Italian cartoon series La Linea to demonstrate how a chart can be animated in Microsoft Excel. I also used the same data in one of my entries to a Tableau data viz contest: Tableau’s Viz as Art Contest – My Entries.

Since it is a cartoon series, it is kind of obvious to also think about visualizing the data in a comic strip (or what I will call storyboard hereafter).

Today’s challenge is to make the size of the storyboard dynamic, i.e. let the user decide with one mouse click, how many images shall be displayed.

This article describes how to do this in Excel and – as usual - comes with the example workbook for free download.

How to handle Line Charts with many Data Series

2 Alternatives to avoid cluttered Line Charts: a Band Chart and an interactive Line Chart highlighting one selected data series when hovering over

804 words, ~4 minutes read

A Line Chart is definitely the best way to visualize the development of a continuous metric over time for several categories. That being said, Line Charts easily get cluttered and even may become useless, if you have many categories. Now, what is "many"? In my humble opinion Line Charts are already hard to read if they show more than 6 to 8 data series. But what if you have way more than 6? Like all countries in Europe or all states of the US?

And then what? No worries, there are alternatives. Adding an interactive feature to your chart can solve the issue.

Today’s post describes two alternative options for Line Charts with many data series: an interactive band chart (without VBA) or a line chart highlighting one data series when hovering over (empowered by VBA). As usual, the article comes with the workbooks for free download.

Adjust Power Query Table Style and Properties

How to adjust the Default Table Style and the Autofit Column Width Property manually and automatically for all Query Tables in a Workbook

960 words, ~5 minutes read

Very often, you get and transform data using Power Query and then load it into a table on a worksheet of your Excel workbook. When loading it for the first time, Power Query makes some decisions for you. Regarding the properties of the query table, but also regarding the used table style.

Most of theses decisions are fine. Especially two of them can become a pain in the neck, though.

First one is autofitting the column widths of the sheet to fit to the size of the header and the data. This is great, if you have only the table itself on the sheet, but it can be annoying, if you have also texts or calculations above the query table.

Second issue is the table design. Power Query uses the built-in Green Table Style Medium 7, not the default Table Style of the workbook.

I do not know of a way in Power Query to change these settings, so you always have to adjust your query table after the first load.

Today’s post describes how to do these adjustments manually for one query table and also provides a ready-to-use VBA code snippet to change properties and styles for all tables in a workbook in one go.