Clearly and Simply

  • Visiting a friend

    Chandoo's KPI Dashboards revisited – the Box Plots

    In summer 2008 my friend and Microsoft Excel MVP Chandoo was kind enough to give me the opportunity of contributing guest posts to his excellent blog Chandoo.org. Actually Chandoo even featured a whole 6 post series on how to create interactive KPI dashboards with Microsoft Excel. Here is a screenshot of the final dashboard:

    PHD KPI Dashboard - click to enlarge

     

    The last part of the series was about box plots to visualize the distribution of the data (Box Plots Excel Dashboards Tutorial), including average and target values. At that time Chandoo and I decided to apply Occam’s razor and we restricted the tutorial to a simplified version of box plots, working only for data sets with positive values.

    This follow-up post on my own blog is about how to create these box plots for all kind of data distribution, i.e. positive and negative values.

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  • There is more than one way to heat a map

    2D Tabular Heatmaps with Microsoft Excel

    NYT Speakers XL Replica - click to enlarge Inspired by a NY Times chart, Juice Analytics recently had a post and a discussion on bubble chart heat maps: Bubble, bubble toil and trouble. Chris Gemignani wrote:

    “The first tool we tried, simply on principle, was Excel 2003. As expected, making a NY Times quality bubble chart in Excel 2003 is a hard problem.”

    Juice Analytics is one of my favorite blogs on visualization and I learned a lot from the blog and website. But in this case I do not agree at all. And it seems as if I am not alone.

    What had to come, came. Some of us – including myself – could not let this rest.

    • I used Fabrice Rimlinger’s famous Sparklines for XL (free download here) and created a replica of the NY Times chart. Fabrice was kind enough to publish this on his blog (Yes, we can) and his own version with an improved visualization using bar charts (Stick to the classics?).
    • Two days later my friend and Excel MVP Chandoo showed Visualizing Search Terms on Travel Sites, a bubble-chart solution with plain old Excel (no VBA).
    • Last, but not least: Andreas Lipphardt of xlCubed was ahead of his times and had a post on creating heatmap tables with Excel based on bubble charts already in August 2008.

    Conclusion: Yes you can. It is not a hard problem to create quality heat maps with Microsoft Excel.

    But let’s take one step back. What if you don’t want to use the size of the bubbles for visualization? What if you want to create a classic heat map, i.e. the higher the value, the darker the fill color of the cell and vice versa? Following a definition like the one on Wikipedia:

    “A heat map is a graphical representation of data where the values taken by a variable in a two-dimensional map are represented as colors.”

    Can you create a classic 2-dimensional tabular heatmap with Microsoft Excel as well?

    Yes, you can. And there is more than one way to skin the cat. This post shows the different options and includes all examples for free download.

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  • What is not on paper has not been said

    Monitor your project with an Action Point Register

    „Action point register? What is an action point register? A to-do-list?”

    Well, yes and no. Basically it is a to-do-list, however not for a single person but for a team or a project group. It helps the project manager to document, assign, schedule and track all action points and issues.

    „Alright, it is a longer to-do-list and distributed among the team members. Who needs another Excel template for a to-do-list?”

    I agree, it is really easy to create a simple to-do-list with Microsoft Excel within a couple of minutes and probably most of you have already done this. Even if you don’t want to create one, several websites and blogs are providing different free templates for to-do-lists / action point registers.

    So why publish another one? Well, because I think this one is a bit more sophisticated. And it is quite in line with the post on importing Microsoft Project files into Microsoft Excel.

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  • Lithuania at a glance

    A Data Analysis and Dashboard Showcase with Microsoft Excel

    Lithuanian Census Dashboard - click to enlarge This post is about a showcase. Don’t expect too much. I will not provide a detailed how-to tutorial. All you can learn from this post is that you should not toss Excel as a matter of principle, when you have to create Business Intelligence tools and dashboards. Agreed, Excel has its limitations especially with regards to the access to larger external databases. And Excel’s chart engine has some limitations as well. Nevertheless Excel provides the flexibility to create compelling and professional dashboards.

    Recently a Lithuanian company invited me to conduct a training to their marketing department. The focus of this training shall be on how to create Excel models including dashboards and visualizations made to stick. I haven’t done trainings for quite a while, but I do remember that the perfect start for a training is a demonstration of what it will be about and what the participants will be able to do afterwards. Therefore I created a showcase based on the Lithuanian Census 2001.

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  • Bring your tasks in a row

    How to import Microsoft Project files into Microsoft Excel

    mpp_to_xls Have you ever managed a larger project with several subprojects, hundreds of tasks and milestones, dozens of members in the project team and even more other staff contributing to the project, spread all over almost every department of the company? If so, you might have used Microsoft Project to plan and monitor the project.

    Since there were so many different people contributing, you may have encountered the following challenge: You had to distribute the actual project plan to all team members at least once a week, but not everyone had Microsoft Project installed on his computer. So you couldn’t simply send the Microsoft Project file.

    Sounds familiar? What do you usually do?

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