Clearly and Simply

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.

Power BI lookalike Tooltips in Microsoft Excel

How to create Power BI lookalike Tooltips in Microsoft Excel Charts

1,361 words, ~7 minutes read

Tooltips are an extremely helpful feature to explore and understand data.

When hovering over a data point of a chart, a textbox appears and displays the values and – if applicable - even additional information.

I love working with Microsoft Excel. I truly love the application. But I will make no bones about it: Microsoft Excel’s native chart tooltips are mostly pointless. There is no option to adjust or format them, to link the content to a cell range or the like. They only display default information and this is pretty useless in most cases. All you can do is to turn them off in Excel’s options to get them out of your hair.

I already posted a few articles about this subject, the first one back in 2010, including the same rant as above: Better Chart Tooltips with Microsoft Excel 2010.

Microsoft didn’t do anything about it. Excel’s chart tooltips are still as lame as they have been in the past 20 years. This is remarkable, because Microsoft provides much better tooltips in Power BI. So, they are aware that tooltips are helpful, but apparently they don’t see the necessity to let Excel users take advantage of it, too. So we are still on our own here.

Although I already provided a few options to display better tooltips in Excel (e.g. Customizable Tooltips on Excel Charts), I would like to come back to this topic again.

Power BI does not only automatically insert tooltips on charts, it also shows a vertical line across the entire plot area and displays the tooltip even if the mouse cursor is not above the plotted data series.

That intrigued me. Today’s post will provide 2 options how to mimic Power BI lookalike tooltips on Microsoft Excel charts. As always, the post comes with the Excel workbooks for free download.

Animated Maps in Microsoft Excel

How to create an animated Choropleth Map (aka Heat Map, Filled Map, Thematic Map or Statistical Map) in Microsoft Excel

1.006 words, ~5 minutes read

In one of the recent articles (All Peaks of the Alps visualized in Excel), I tried to show how to combine different advanced techniques in Microsoft Excel (posted here or elsewhere) to create highly interactive Excel dashboards.

I will tell you no lies: that one was a washout. The interest in that post and workbook was next to nothing. Now, you certainly expect I would have learned my lesson and try something else. I did learn something, but the stubborn old man I am, I can’t let it go yet. Thus, I decided to give the idea another shot.

Animated Choropleth or Heat Maps have become quite popular, especially in the past few weeks. So, there is nothing more obvious than providing a template with an animated Choropleth Map in Excel, is it?

Today’s post will briefly explain how to combine two advanced Excel techniques which have already been published here: a Choropleth Map and the animation of visualizations in Excel.

As always, the article comes with the workbooks for free download: an animated map of Germany by districts (Kreise und kreisfreie Städte) and one of the United States by counties.

All Peaks of the Alps visualized in Excel

Bluffing some of Tableau’s amazing interactive features in Microsoft Excel: an Excel Replica of All Peaks of the Alps visualized with Tableau

The previous post provided a Tableau visualization of all peaks of the Alps. I already bluffed some of Tableau’s amazing interactive features in Microsoft Excel and published the solutions here.

The idea wasn’t mine, though, but Matt Grams’.

Matt started the journey in 2009 (!) with his beautiful guest article Bluffing a Visual Cross-tab with Excel. I followed a few months later with Bluffing Tableau Actions with Microsoft Excel. Ever since, I posted a few techniques to replicate Tableau’s interactive options in Microsoft Excel.

Back in 2013, I created an entire Excel replica of one of my Tableau workbooks, which was once selected as the Viz of the Day by Tableau: Bruce Springsteen Discography - A Tableau Infographic. This is the Excel replica: Bruce Springsteen Discography in Excel.

To carry on this tradition, today’s article provides an Excel replica of All Peaks of the Alps visualized with Tableau. Truth be told, of course not replicating all of Tableau’s features, but still some interesting interactive functionality in Excel beyond the defaults.   

All Peaks of the Alps visualized with Tableau

A Tableau visualization of all peaks of the alps including the option to find and highlight one peak or to select one by clicking on the map

The FrankensTeam runs one of the most interesting and resourceful websites about advanced charting techniques in Microsoft Excel (E90E50fx). In March 2015 the team met in person for the very first time in Milan. To celebrate this, they published an Excel workbook with a visualization of all peaks of the Alps: Meeting in Milano, trip to the Alps and an Excel chart. 

Having been a mountaineer in my younger days, I was intrigued with this idea. I asked them for permission to use the idea and data for a replica of their visualization in Tableau. They kindly agreed.

I am deeply ashamed to admit that I am sitting on the Tableau replica for a couple of years already, but never published it. Until today.

This post provides and explains a Tableau Public workbook showing all peaks of the alps with all the amazing interactive features of Tableau.