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...
Compare Performance to Yes-No Conditions in Excel Charts
When you see changes in trends of business performance, it's natural to ask what caused them.
Excel charts can answer many of those questions by...
Compare Metrics by Category Using Excel Dot Plot Charts
Management reports often must compare measures of performance by some type of category.
For example, reports could compare sales by product, variance by department, sales...
Fun with XY (Scatter) Charts in Excel
Because I’d been working hard on a project for many months, I once decided to take a break and play around with XY charts…which...
Interactive Dashboard Magic with Excel Slicers
The figure below illustrates an Excel magic trick I created for an Excel Dashboard, using in Excel 2016.
The key trick is the method I...
How to Use Excel Slicers to Control Settings in Your Reports and Analyses
The figure below is using Slicers to control a setting in a workbook, a setting that tells Excel's Camera tool which of three images...
Bad Chart! Bad, Bad Chart!
(Download my improved Excel version of the bad charts show below.)
The Wall Street Journal usually publishes excellent charts. And Excel users usually can duplicate those professional-quality...
Introducing the Power of Year-Over-Year Performance Charts in Excel
The purpose of management reports should be to help readers find and track patterns of performance…quickly and easily.
That’s the attraction of charts, of course....
Three Simple Tricks to Improve Analytical Charting in Excel
For years, my Excel charts of trends used a simple idea: To gain insights about periodic data, just chart it.
What else was there to...
Three More Simple Tricks to Improve Excel Charts for Business
In 3 Simple Tricks to Improve Analytical Charting in Excel, I showed you how to shift time periods, index your data, and chart your rate...
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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