very good effort to better the gauge chart with trending info. Although the new chart provides very good info without any eyesore, I guess they could be slightly difficult to do, given the scripting part involved.

I have made a tutorial for simple bullet graphs (incell) for people who would like to shy away from any form of vba.. you can find it here: http://chandoo.org/wp/2008/07/21/dashboard-bullet-graphs-excel/

Let me know your comments :)

The weakness of a bullet or gauge graph here is the use of a month-to-date value in the chart. I used the line chart as a way to use the cumulative month-to-date values for the current month to give a sense whether the percentage shown on the gauge had a chance of becoming a good value by the end of the month. My line chart forces the user to extrapolate to the end of the month, but a gauge or bullet does not even provide that ability.

Greg’s normalization of month-to-date by expected-month-to-date improves on my line chart because a good value is always in the “good” zone. His normalized value could be displayed in a gauge or bullet if the day-to-day variability is of no consequence.

I’m most cases, I prefer Stephen’s approach (we quote him a lot but ignore his recommendations). Use a sparkline that shows the trend for previous months (the more meaningful trend in the context of this example) and a bullet graph for the current month.

The chart isn’t really hard to work out. Primary axis has the line chart, secondary axis has the stacked columns for the background (that’s with one point per each stacked column series; you could use 31-point series and keep them on the primary axis, which is probably easier for everyone but me). Stacked columns need gap width of zero. Remove the secondary value axis.

I like Greg’s suggestion too, so I’ll include that in the tutorial.