Do you have a chart which is too confusing? Try replacing the one chart with four smaller charts, each chart focusing on one particular statistic. Episode 604 shows you how.
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 277 tips from the book!
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 277 tips from the book!
Transcript of the video:
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast. I'm Bill Jelen.
Today is an interesting charting tip.
Right here I have a chart that attempts to compare our company to four other companies and so there's five different time series showing data from 2001 to 2007 and really when you try to put five time series on one single chart, it just becomes confusing.
No one can look at this and really figure out exactly what's going on.
So a cool tip is to take that one chart and replace it with 4 smaller charts.
Basically in every chart, we're comparing our company versus one of the competitors and really that's what people want to see.
They want to see how we're doing versus each competitor.
So now we can see you know, our company versus Oher Guys.
Other Guys are just going up and down and we're smooth.
Versus this new company. The new company's coming along.
They're about the same size as we are.
The Mega company, the company that have had market share is falling off and we're actually meeting them and then versus some other company, we're kind of trending along.
So people can now look at this and see exactly how we're doing against each competitor and because there's only two lines on each chart, they can actually get a feeling for what's going on rather than just having a mess with the five charts on the one sheet.
The other thing I've done is I've made each chart smaller.
About one-fourth the size that it used to be, so this fits in the exact same spot.
For example, an executive dashboard as the one big chart.
but it is so much more useful to break that data up into four charts.
The next time you're trying to show a whole bunch of information on one single chart think about breaking it up into several different charts and each chart can be smaller, but have a detailed bit of information.
Hey, thanks for stopping by. We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Today is an interesting charting tip.
Right here I have a chart that attempts to compare our company to four other companies and so there's five different time series showing data from 2001 to 2007 and really when you try to put five time series on one single chart, it just becomes confusing.
No one can look at this and really figure out exactly what's going on.
So a cool tip is to take that one chart and replace it with 4 smaller charts.
Basically in every chart, we're comparing our company versus one of the competitors and really that's what people want to see.
They want to see how we're doing versus each competitor.
So now we can see you know, our company versus Oher Guys.
Other Guys are just going up and down and we're smooth.
Versus this new company. The new company's coming along.
They're about the same size as we are.
The Mega company, the company that have had market share is falling off and we're actually meeting them and then versus some other company, we're kind of trending along.
So people can now look at this and see exactly how we're doing against each competitor and because there's only two lines on each chart, they can actually get a feeling for what's going on rather than just having a mess with the five charts on the one sheet.
The other thing I've done is I've made each chart smaller.
About one-fourth the size that it used to be, so this fits in the exact same spot.
For example, an executive dashboard as the one big chart.
but it is so much more useful to break that data up into four charts.
The next time you're trying to show a whole bunch of information on one single chart think about breaking it up into several different charts and each chart can be smaller, but have a detailed bit of information.
Hey, thanks for stopping by. We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
