I was reading Chandoo‘s post Us vs. Them – Compare Sales Performance using Charts & Form Controls, and the first step in his protocol was “Prepare your data”. I’m always telling people to prepare their data first. I tell people to spend five minutes on their data, and save themselves five hours of frustration later on. Pay me now or pay me later.
There are a number of aspects involved in preparing your data, and I’ll cover some of them here. I will concentrate on best practices for chart source data, but the principles also apply for other purposes. Factors to keep in mind are the layout of the data, both in terms of blank rows and columns in the data and whether the data is oriented by row or by column. Aspects of chart data include knowing which ranges of data are used for X and Y values and for series names, and how to get Excel to use the right data for the right parts of the chart. Finally, should you format your chart data so it looks nice in that monthly report, or should you splurge and use multiple data ranges? [Read more…] about Prepare Your Data
