How to Create Excel Traffic Lights with Charts and Text
"Traffic lights" are a common feature offered by software designed for management reporting and analysis.
Traffic lights provide at least two benefits. First, they alert...
How to Create Dynamic Chart Legends in Excel
When I saw a chart designed like the ones below in the Wall Street Journal, I knew I had to create one just like...
How to Create Cycle Plots in Excel to Chart Seasonal Sales Data
If your company's sales are seasonable, you've probably seen a chart that looks something like the first one below.
This Excel chart shows the continuous...
How to Create Bullet Graphs to Replace Gauges in Excel
Business presentations desperately need a replacement for dashboard gauges. Gauges consume too much space in a report. They use excessive "chart junk." They're not...
How to Create a Rolling Forecast of Seasonal Sales in Excel
The Excel chart below shows the typical saw-tooth pattern of seasonal sales.
Seasonal sales have about the same pattern every year, every week, or both. In...
How to Change Text to Columns When You Copy and Paste in Excel
Today I needed to copy a bunch of numeric tables from a pdf file into Excel.
When I pasted the first table, all the data...
How to Add Background Images in Excel
"How can I place a background image and still use the cells that the image covers?" -- Sally M.
Sally,
You can do this, but possibly...
How and Why to Define Excel Range Names with a Worksheet Scope
In Excel, a name can be global to a workbook or local to a worksheet. The traditional method we all use when we create...
Highlight Normal Results in Line Charts to Make Exceptional Results Stand Out
Line charts that show trends in performance are the most useful type of chart that management reports can contain.
All managers want good performance to...
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...
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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