Clearly and Simply

Tag: excel

  • Visual Workbook Navigation with a Chart Carousel

    A Carousel of Charts as a visual and interactive Navigation Control for Microsoft Excel Workbooks

    726 words, ~4 minutes read

    Visual Navigation IntroIf your Excel workbook has many output worksheets, you should provide your users with an option to facilitate the navigation within the model.

    Sure, the user always has the option to right click on the arrows left to the first tab and select any worksheet from there, but this requires that she/he exactly knows where to find what.

    It is best practice to give the users guidance regarding the content of your model and to enable them to easily navigate to the sheets they are most interested in. Usually, you insert an extra worksheet containing a list of all tabs with hyperlinks or buttons to quickly navigate to those sheets.

    You are interested in something more visually compelling? If so, you came to the right place. Today’s article provides a visual workbook navigation control with a chart carousel dynamically displaying the content of the relevant sheets. The user can easily browse through all views, select the desired one and get to the view with one mouse click. As always, the post comes with an example workbook for free download.

    (more…)

  • 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. Peaks of the Alps - IntroI 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.

    (more…)