Comments on: Accordion Chart for Jorge

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Sun, 31 May 2009 16:07:56 +0000

Jorge’s accordion chart is dynamic, so the handful of bars under the cursor is thicker and darker, while the others are de-emphasized. This chart and the previous one you showed are not exactly the same as the one I built for Jorge. They are, however, a nice way to highlight the top and bottom groups of results.

By: Liu 's chart blog

Liu 's chart blog — Sat, 30 May 2009 12:32:22 +0000

Hi Jon－：

A more simple way to create a Accordion Chart for Jorge , is showed as the folloing image:
http://1853.img.pp.sohu.com.cn/images/blog/2009/5/30/20/17/1223d8b1de2g215.jpg
1. use rept function to create the bar , the font is set to Gautami.
2. then set height of the middle rows to 3 .
3. other formating . you can get a Accordion Chart.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Fri, 29 May 2009 22:57:53 +0000

Liu - I couldn't read the articles, but the image you show in the middle link is a clever way to highlight "Good" and "Bad" with colors. Hope you don't mind that I've displayed it here:

By: Liu 's chart blog

Liu 's chart blog — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:30:04 +0000

To : pi -
the following article may help you :
http://excelpro.blog.sohu.com/112324178.html
http://1812.img.pp.sohu.com.cn/images/blog/2009/3/15/20/15/120b4beeaebg215.jpg
http://www.brsbox.com/filebox/down/fc/b8ace6b3a8ed6dfc50f3759d4992e8ca

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:16:18 +0000

Format series “Bold” to change the colors of the dark, thick bars. Format the “LightLow” and “LightHigh” series to change the light, thin bars.

By: pi

pi — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:59:46 +0000

I have a question how do I change the light bar color to red and the dark bar color to green for instance. This is a great spreadsheet!

By: Liu 's chart blog

Liu 's chart blog — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 14:18:19 +0000

So cool!
I would make the first 5 green, the bottom 5 red, and the middles gray .,it is more simple .

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:18:00 +0000

Colin -

Oh yeah, 2007. I forgot to check it out. I’ll put it on my list.

Jorge -

So you want this generalized to any size data set… I suppose it could be done, but that’s going to take more work. What’s the budget for this project?? ;-)

By: Focus + Context Bar Chart (a Bar Chart Is Not a Skyscraper) | Jorge Camoes' Charts

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:04:49 +0000

[...] if you want to know how to do this in Excel and read a great discussion about it, Jon wrote Accordion Chart for Jorge. He not only discusses some of the options but also shares the Excel file with us. Thanks Jon! And [...]

By: Jorge Camoes

Jorge Camoes — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:23:36 +0000

Great job, Jon , as usual. Thanks for improving the idea and making the file available.

Since I’m a “pretty tough customer”, here is another challenge: how can we generalize to any number of data points (a chart ranking countries by GDP, or even population by county), while keeping the chart small? If you use a standard bar chart at some point the labels will overlap.

I was trying to solve this with error bars in a scatter plot. This gives you all the flexibility you need, but requires more code, since the mouse move only recognizes the series if the cursor is over the (invisible) data point (correct me if I’m wrong).

I agree with comptonator, this (the original bar chart) is not very interesting. But the moment you add interaction you are creating interesting possibilities. For example, detail charts that change when the highlighted state changes.

Of course, if we plan to display just a subset probably the easiest way to do it is using the Autofilter and in-cell charts, via REPT() function.