In-Cell Bullet Charts
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2009.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge introduced the concept of Bullet Graphs a few years ago, and their use as a replacement for various gauge charts is slowly expanding. Bullet graphs are easier to read than the many gauges that adorn poorly designed business dashboards, while taking up less space and breaking the ineffective metaphor of a business dashboard as the cockpit of a 747.
Charley Kyd of Excel User shows How to Create Bullet Graphs To Replace Gauges in Excel.
Dealer Diagnostics shows how to Create Bullet Graphs with Google Charts.
And now Chandoo of Pointy Haired Dilbert wants to help you Become a Dashboard Ninja with Bullet Graphs. Chandoo has done some interesting things with conditional formatting (visit his blog for examples), which he uses for the background colors of his bullets, shown below. The bars and the ticks used to indicate last year’s performance are controlled by worksheet formulas.
This is a clever way to get bullet charts into an Excel report.
Possibly Related Posts:
- New Feature: The Chart Doctor
- The Whatever Files, 15 May 2009
- Dashboards
- A Gauge that Works?
- Web Stats – June 2009
- Weekly Links 2008-August-22
- Happy New Year in Numbers, Charts, and Links
- A Retrospective on Charting
- Edward Tufte and Business Charts
- Pie Chart for Pi Day
Posted: Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 under Chart Types.
Comments: 4
Comments
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Wednesday, July 23, 2008, 2:55 pm
Sure, it’s a cool technique. Wish I’d thought of it.
Comment from kalin
Time: Monday, September 8, 2008, 10:15 pm
Kalin from Dealer Diagnostics here. I thought you might also be interested to know that we have released a gadget that can make the bullet graphs we had created using the google charts API using live data from a Google spreadsheet.
http://dealerdiagnostics.com/blog/2008/09/the-ddr-bullet-graph-gadget/
Comment from Liu ’s chart blog
Time: Monday, September 7, 2009, 4:52 am
Here is a simple method to create a bullet chart in excel via error bar of a scatt plot:
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