Recently, in our training academy, charting legend Jon Peltier demonstrated the best data structure required for working with Charts in Excel. Following this, one of our academy members asked this question: I am trying to use what Jon was teaching in the charting master class for stacked legends. Is there anyway to get that … Read more
Power BI has a really nice way of cross-filtering visuals. When you click on a visual, it highlights the selected item in other charts while also retaining the total value in a lighter color. Can we cross filter visuals in Excel? No. But we can create something pretty close. Power BI Example: This post was … Read more
In a previous post, we created a waffle chart in Excel using the easiest method. To use it as an object on any worksheet, we needed to use a linked picture. The problem is that linked pictures don’t work in Excel Online (I know!!! Super annoying, right!). So, in this post, I want to show … Read more
Waffle charts are like square pie charts. However, rather than slices of a pie, values are represented by the number of colored squares. They are commonly found on dashboards and newspaper articles because they are easy to read at a glance. In this post, we look at how to make waffle charts in Excel using … Read more
I was recently asked to add a QR code to a document. While I had seen them before, I had never needed to create one from scratch. But, it turns out it’s pretty simple and free in Excel. So, in this post, we look at 3 easy ways to create QR codes in Excel. Table … Read more
Chart legends show us what each Series in a chart represents. These legends are often placed in boxes near the chart. However, research shows that separating the labels from the item in this way requires more brain power from readers and detracts from the key message. So, in this post, we look at how to … Read more
Sankey diagrams are used to show flow between two or more categories, where the width of each individual element is proportional to the flow rate. These chart types are available in Power BI, but are not natively available in Excel. However, today I want to show you that it is possible to create a Sankey diagram … Read more
From stock parts to holiday villas, from employees to logos, there are plenty of reasons to insert and automatically change an image based on a cell. You may think of this as a lookup function that returns a picture, rather than a value. Ultimately, the purpose is to link an image or picture to a cell; … Read more
Imagine you’ve created a beautiful chart for your Excel report. You decide to hide the source data because the report’s users don’t need to see that. Suddenly the information in the chart disappears. So, this raises the question: how to show hidden data in an Excel chart? We answer this question in this post. But, … Read more
Charts and graphs are one of the best features of Excel; they are very flexible and can be used to make some very advanced visualization. However, this flexibility means there are hundreds of different options. We can create exactly the visualization we want but it can be time-consuming to apply. When we want to apply those hundreds … Read more