Thanks again for the time.

I’m not sure offhand how I’d show your data. The grid already takes up two dimensions, and I don’t know how to add the values to the grid. One could break it into a lot of individual line charts, or maybe a stacked area chart, where each series is the collections for expenses incurred in a given month, plotted against the month the expenses were paid.

The sheet is in 3 sections at this point. The first section shows dollars. Then I do a calculation to get a percentage of completion. Finally, I have a calculation to derive a 6 month average. This allows me to see if the specific month of payment, say the first month, is going up or down.

Thought about using one of these dynamic type charges where I could scroll through showing how the percentages change over a 12-months at a time. I have used an area chargt that shows trends over time–again it will be more useful if I could roll the selected 12 months by moving a spinner. The more manual part that throws me initially is having the data that needs to be the source arranged diagonally. Not to mention whether this is the best choice of chart. Of course, this is one worksheet of several types of lags that have to be analyzed, but, back to my main question: what chart or charts might help depict trends better. The second part of the analysis I am doing is trying to show the impact of say a change in percentages from Jan-Jun and what that will do to cash flows. That’s really the main point–but again, manual.

Sorry for the long post (I’ve been at this for a while now!)

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pqZR0t7LxFYKoVsTUTf7tUA

Could you post a link to an example of such a table?

These really are just rectangular pie charts. Enough said.

From Wikipedia:

Marimekko is a Finnish company based in Helsinki that has made important contributions to fashion, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. They are particularly noted for brightly-colored printed fabrics and simple styles. . . . Marimekko was founded in 1951 by Armi and Viljo Ratia, when Armi asked some artist friends to apply their graphic designs to textiles.

I wonder how long they have been used in marketing. The canonical reference in statistics is
J. A. Hartigan and B. Kleiner. Mosaics for contingency tables. In Computer Science and Statistics: Proceedings of the 13th Symposium on the Interface, pages 268–273, Fairfax Station, VA, 1981. Interface Foundation of North America, Inc. I suspect this is probably earlier than marimekko plots, because it’s certainly before the ready availability of colour graphics.

I don’t point this out in order to claim primacy for statistics, but unless related disciplines talk to each other then people up reinventing the wheel and making unnecessary mistakes.

So where did they name Marimekko come from anyway? I have always wondered but could not find the origin quickly online.

“. . . why they find them more effective . . .”

I’ve had this discussion with a marketing guy. He wanted mekkos, nothing less. He didn’t care that bar charts were easy to make and easy to read. He didn’t care that mekkos were hard to make and easy to break, or that they were easily misinterpreted. He Had-To-Have Marimekkos.

So I made him a template with a big old Marimekko chart, using a technique much more tedious and fragile than the one I posted last week. He loved it.