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
I’m not going to lie to you, the first time I saw a slopegraph, I was completely underwhelmed, I thought “it’s just a line chart with two points, hardly worth getting excited about”. But the reaction, the first time I used one in a presentation, was unbelievable. People even asked me for my template, so … Read more
A fan chart, or uncertainty chart, as I like to call them, is a way to display historical data along with a prediction of future values. For example, they are often used to indicate inflation or exchange rate predictions, but can display any data with an uncertain future value. So how can we create a … Read more
Step charts show data that changes at specific points, then remain consistent until the following change occurs. It’s not a default chart type, but I want to share with you how to create a step chart in Excel. Interest rates set by central banks across the world follow a similar system. Some important people in … Read more
In this post, I want to answer a question asked by a reader. The question was from Nick: “I have a chart on a separate chart sheet, where I’d like to add a developer object (button, option box or checkbox) to control whether data is shown quarterly or monthly. Any idea how to do that?” … Read more
“Not again…” I think to myself every time I change the minimum and maximum values of a chart axis. It’s such a tedious task, and I know I’ll be doing it again at a future point. It only takes a few seconds, but all that time starts to add up. There are various chart objects we can link … Read more
In Excel, the standard column chart will display all columns with the same width at regular intervals. However, in some circumstances, it would be better for the width of each column to be different. For example, where each column represents different ranges of data. This same principle of column width also applies to histograms. Excel … Read more
Whenever I see promotional images for expensive BI Dashboard software, they always show the same thing – a map with countries or regions highlighted in different colors. It sends the subtle message that maps are the pinnacle of Business Intelligence (whether they are or not is a different matter altogether). Until Excel 2016, these Map … Read more