GetOpenFilename and GetSaveAsFilename are useful dialogs to use within Excel VBA procedures when your procedure needs to know the filename of a file to open or save. I have encapsulated each into functions that add to their functionality, and make then simpler to use in my procedures.
Note that both GetXxxxFilename functions return file names. They [...]

In Data Visualizations Related to Gas Prices, Tony Rose of Support Analytics Consulting shows a series of visualizations he’s culled from the web, all related to gasoline prices. One infographic stuck out, partly for its overuse of chart junk, and partly for Tony’s interpretation. Here is the original chart, which Tony took from www.thebiblog.com, followed [...]

In Bad Graphics - Stacked Pyramid Chart, I critiqued a popular infographic display type, the pyramid chart. In this post I will repeat the favor for funnel charts. These are not the funnel charts which are also called tornado charts, and in some circles are used to construct population pyramids (see Tornado Charts and Tornado [...]

In Contest - Excel Models for Science and Engineering I announced a contest for scientific and engineering uses of Excel. People can enter up to three candidate Excel models (up to six if they blog about the contest) by posting a link to the model in a comment to that post or to this one. [...]

When people think of an Excel combination chart, they usually think of a chart with lines and columns, or something similar that they found on the list of “Built-In Custom” chart types (I just love that oxymoron). However, line and XY series are types that combine to make decent charts. The line chart’s Date Scale [...]

I’ve decided to follow up to my recent Close Races post. My last chart in that post was a dot plot, and the lines were dark enough to detract from the plotted points (below left). I’ve lightened the lines (below right) to reduce this effect, while keeping the lines to help viewers trace the series. [...]

In Close Races, Kaiser of Junk Charts writes about the “racetrack” charts used in the New York Times to compare candidates’ performances in different demographic categories. Specifically, the charts compare votes received by Clinton and Obama in cities, suburban regions, and rural areas. The New York Times charts are donut charts, or pie charts with [...]

I’m jumping on the blog contest bandwagon. The intent is to highlight scientific and engineering applications of Microsoft Excel, by sharing models that users have built.
In Physics Lesson, I showed how to construct a simple yet robust model to describe a physical phenomenon. This is a departure from most Excel applications, which involve finance or [...]

A visitor to the Microsoft newsgroups wanted his area chart to show a different color for positive and negative values. This is easy enough to do in a column chart. One technique is simply to use the Invert if Negative formatting option, the other it to make a conditional chart with one series for positive [...]

A high school physics teacher was asking questions in the Excel programming newsgroup about his VBA procedure that accepted input values (time, position, velocity, and acceleration) from the workbook, calculated values of position and velocity vs. elapsed time, and charted the results. I answered a couple of his VBA questions, but I suggested that he [...]