Add Low-Overwhelm Context to Your Line Charts
The data you display in charts often takes on new meaning when you display it in the context of other data.
One way to add...
Calculate Mortgage Payments and Your ROA with an Excel CalcPlot Chart
An Excel CalcPlot Chart allows you to plot values in three dimensions, not merely two. Here are two examples.
Mortgage Paments
Mortgage interest rates are at...
Dashboard-Like Excel Charts of International Consumer Confidence
The following Excel figure displays its charts in a dashboard-like format. At least, it's in a format that dashboards should use!
When you use simple...
Use Common-Age Excel Charts to Compare and Forecast Performance for the Same Number of...
In the early lives of new products or new stores, managers often are anxious to track and improve sales performance. To do so, it's...
Should You Raise Prices? Should You Lower Them? These Excel Charts Can Help You...
In the early 1980s I was the CFO of a company owned by a man whose first instinct was to cut prices.
When business was...
Map Costs and Sales in Excel with a Classic Breakeven Chart
When I worked as a CFO, my monthly reports always included a breakeven chart. It was one of the most popular reports I produced.
But...
Excel Is Great for Business Intelligence!
With the right access to data, Excel can become an outstanding Business Intelligence (BI) system.
Business Intelligence (BI) is the systematic use of information about...
Excel Charts, Seasonality, & Analysis: Five Lessons from the WSJ
A 2009 article in the Wall Street Journal offered some great advice for Excel users in business. The article, New Light on the Plight of...
Down With Gauges!
It's possible to carry an analogy too far.
Dashboards for managers are logically similar to dashboards for cars. Both types of dashboards provide key information...
Do Your Excel Reports Document Performance? Or Communicate It?
When you report or analyze performance in Excel, you need to ask yourself a key question...
Am I documenting results, or communicating them?
There’s a huge...
Latest Articles
Getting Radical with Excel
It's time to think about Excel in a radical new way—when we use it to work with business or economic data.
It's time, in fact,...
How Fast Is Too Fast?
(Originally published in Inc Magazine.)
What typically tops the list of worries of the chief executive officers of fast growing companies? Financing that growth, according...
How to Smooth Data by Using the TREND Function
Years ago, I read that Prof. William S. Cleveland had suggested that data could be smoothed by calculating a centered trendline through adjacent data—a...
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