Microsoft introduced Sparklines as a native feature of Excel 2010. In a rare guest post, Sparklines For Excel vs. Excel 2010 Sparklines by Alex Kerin of Data Driven Consulting compared this new feature to existing third-party sparkline add-ins for Excel. In Sparklines and Data Bars in Excel 2010, I gave an introduction into how to use the new [...]

In Republicans Blamed Most for Ineffective Government in U.S. Poll, Bloomberg show results of a poll that asked who was to blame for ineffective national government in Washington. Their results were shown in this donut chart: I was pointed to the Bloomberg article by Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, who wondered in Everybody Hates Everybody Else why [...]

Excel offers a great many different chart types. Many of these are 3D types, which should be left off the palette of any serious data technician. Here is a simple cross-tab table of data, showing how the strength of an experimental alloy varies as a function of alloy chemical composition and test temperature. In a [...]

Excel 2010 Chart Type Dialog Excel offers a wide range of standard chart types. Below is the Chart Type dialog from Excel 2010, but all of these standard chart types have been available since Excel 97, and most of them since before that. What makes my dialog different is that it has been annotated to [...]

Excel has built-in chart types for clustered columns and bars, and for stacked columns and bars. One of the commonest charting questions in online Excel forums is, “How do I make a chart that is both clustered and stacked?” This article demonstrates a protocol that works in both modern versions of Excel, that is, Excel [...]

Waterfall charts are commonly used in business to show how a value changes from one state to another through a series of intermediate changes. For example, you can project next year’s profit or cash flow starting with this year’s value, and showing the up and down effects of changing costs, revenues, and other inputs. Waterfall [...]