Tutorials

I’ve never been a big VBA coder in Excel, but I’ve always wanted to be a big VBA coder in Excel. It would certainly save me a lot of time, but, well, yeah, I just haven’t learned. Until now! Over…

In a recent article about the political geography in Scotland, The Guardian created a tile grid map, but instead of inserting text in the grid, they inserted Sankey diagrams. It was an interesting approach, and Alberto Cairo remarked that, “I…

This is a guest post from David Napoli, a BI & Analytics Director (and recovering rocket scientist) who has worked as lead actuary, statistician, and headed up analytics departments for several healthcare organizations over the last 20 years. In a…

Yesterday, I wrote a tutorial on how to create a static tile grid map in Excel–today, I move onto creating an interactive version. The static tile grid maps are quite nice, but an interactive version would be kind of awesome….

How many times have you heard someone rail against the use of maps in data visualization? The areas are not scaled to the data; geography distorts the patterns; you can’t accurately discern the quantities…. And yet, people love maps. They…

You probably know that I’m a big fan of slope charts. And dot plots. Big fan. Love them both. But neither are default chart types in Excel, which, believe it or not, is still the primary data visualization tool for…

Marimekko charts encode two variables: one along the height of the vertical axis and another using the width of the bars or columns. This one from The Economist, for example, has GDP per capita ($) on the vertical axis and…

In Chapter 5 of Cole Nussbaumer’s new book, Storytelling with Data, she shows a revised version of a stacked column chart that highlights three segments with labels off to the left and two summary numbers to the right. It looks…

I was asked recently if it is possible to make this graph in Excel. It’s just a simple line chart with the data labels placed on the point instead of above or below, as is the usual case. I generally…

Last week, I showed you how to use Excel’s Conditional Formatting menu to add cell formats to highlight specific data values. Here, I’ll show you how to easily use the Color Scales options in that menu to create a Heatmap….