I recently wrote a tutorial showing how to create Marimekko Charts in Excel. Like a lot of the chart types I write about, the Marimekko requires a substantial amount of data engineering. Face it, these charts are tedious to build manually.

In order to reduce the tedium of manually rearranging the data and then manually constructing the chart, I’ve developed the PTS Merimekko Chart Utility. Like all of my utilities, it reduces the manual process to simply selecting a range, choosing a couple of options, and admiring the result.

There are some problems with Marimekko Charts. Some of the data in the “mekko” is encoded as linear dimensions, that is, the widths and heights of the rectangular shapes comprising the chart. The linear comparisons suffer from the shapes being stacked: without a common baseline it is more difficult to compare their dimensions.  Worse, some of the data is encoded as the product of the linear dimensions, that is, by the area of the shapes. Because of this, it has been said that the Marimekko is hardly better than a square pie chart.

These issues can be overcome by replacing the Marimekko with a set of bar charts, perhaps arranged in a panel chart.

Despite the shortcomings of the Marimekko, it is broadly used in many industries, particularly in portfolio analysis, such as used in marketing departments and in financial institutions. The Marimekko can provide a rapid qualitative view of the constituents of a portfolio.

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