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...
First Excel Dashboard Report Showing Financial Data for a Public Company
The figure below shows the first Excel dashboard to display data about a public company. Although this report looks quite similar to today's reports,...
Use a ‘Visible’ Column in Formulas to Ignore Hidden Rows in Filtered Tables
Excel Tables, introduced in Version 2007, give us the ability to use column filters to hide rows in a Table.
And slicers for Tables, introduced...
Sample Excel Dashboard Reports from Forbes and Business Week
This mock-up is based on a format that Business Week used about thirty years ago. However, their report used a different color scheme. As...
The Two Functions You MUST Know to Return Values from Excel Tables
“Export to Excel is the 3rd most common button in BI apps…after OK and Cancel.”
—Rob Collie, one of the founding engineers behind PowerPivot at...
How to Use Advanced Filters to Create Unique List of Items from an Excel...
(Note: Filters have changed a lot since this page was written. It's scheduled for a complete makeover.)
When we work with data in an Excel...
How to Set Up a Square-Format U.S. Map in Excel
For several years, the Wall Street Journal has occasionally used a square-format US map like the following image. But when I noticed a recent...
Good Examples of Bad Charts: Chart Junk from a Surprising Source
For years, I’ve written that we Excel users should create “magazine-quality” charts for our reports and analyses.
However, we must be very careful of the...
How to Make Top-Ten Charts Easier to Read
Managers need to know where the greatest opportunities and the worst problems can be found. This is why top-item figures are so popular.
These figures...
Chart Your Rate of Change to Reveal Hidden Business Performance
What insights can you gain from the following Excel chart of Apple's quarterly revenues over the past 18 years?
I see three things. First, their...
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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