Data Visualization in Excel

This book takes you well beyond the defaults of Excel charting. It shows you how to apply principles and best practices of data visualization in an accessible way. In the process it streamlines the use of Excel while enabling the creation of much more advanced graphics.

For data visualization practitioners looking to hone their charting craft there are three core questions: what, when, and how. What different options exist. When should I use. How do I make them. Jon’s bestseller "Better Data Visualizations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers, and Wonks” addresses the first two of those enquiries, and much more besides, but this excellent new text gives explicit solutions for the matter of how. For Excel users, beginners or advanced, this book will become an essential practical companion. You’ll learn how to elegantly master the standard charting functions in the most effective and efficient way, but you’ll also discover how to truly make Excel sing, finding novel approaches and clever workarounds to expand your visual vocabulary even further.

I found this book 20 years too late! Seriously, I wish I had this book a long time ago, for its rich collection of tutorials, best practices, lessons learned, and principles of data visualization using Excel. From broken stacked bars to Gantt charts, heatmaps, tile grid maps, and waffle plots (and so much more from A to Z), the many detailed visualization examples in this book will provide tremendous benefit in the workplace whenever and wherever data storytelling, visual analytics, or data-driven decision insights are required. Excel users from beginners to experts will discover useful data visualization examples, corresponding detailed instructions, and perhaps some secrets of Excel here in this wonderful book.

Jonathan Schwabish taught me what constitutes a good chart. In this incredibly useful volume, he teaches me how to make a good chart in Excel. A step-by-step guide – practical, easy to follow and (of course) well-illustrated

Finally, a comprehensive data visualization book for Excel that’s detailed enough that a relative beginner can use it, and extensive enough that an experienced user will also discover tips and learn valuable Excel techniques and data visualization best practices.

“Wow, just wow. One book that explains how to make all the fancy, powerful charts you see in good ol' Excel. If you want to impress your boss with Excel charting wizardry, this is THE BOOK for you. Not only does the book explain the chart construction process, it also provides guidance on designing great outputs. I wish I had this book when I started my data analyst journey. A must buy. Highly recommended.”

Data visualisation has an ever-growing toolbox of applications and programming languages for creating charts, but some may come with steep learning curves, some may require coding skills, and some resources may lack the full range of functionality we really need. The one, often overlooked tool familiar and often available to most of us is Microsoft Excel. In this companion book to Better Data Visualizations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers and Wonks, Jon Schwabish systematically and expertly shows us how to create a wide variety of visualisation types, from simple heatmaps right through to more complex examples such as raincloud plots and Marimekko charts, each with detailed tutorials and with all companion resources available via his website. This book first opens your eyes to the wide range of visualisation possibilities that were most likely available to you all along in Excel, then promptly equips you with the skills to create them all.

Those who expanded their graphicacy with Schwabish's Better Data Visualizations are going to love the follow up, in which Jon outlines how to make graphs using the ubiquitous Microsoft Excel. Readers will appreciate Jon's pragmatic examples, easy-to-follow instructions and entertaining writing. If you need to communicate with data and lack confidence making graphs in Excel, I urge you to add Data Visualization in Excel to your library!

There aren’t many places where the cliché “think outside the box” can be applied with such propriety (and benefits) than when making charts in Excel. If you go beyond its poor chart library and defaults, there is a whole world to discover, and Jon’s new book is a great journey companion. This detailed step-by-step tutorial will show you how to take advantage of Excel’s flexibility, how to use design and formatting options far from their original intent and how to visualize data directly on the spreadsheet, going even further away from the chart library. On top of this, Jon is a communicator and a data visualization expert, so his many examples are relevant (many analytical tasks can benefit from them) and designed for effectiveness applying sound data visualization guidelines.

I am making this my go-to textbook for teaching myself and my students to create better, more effective, and different graphs in Excel to operationalize the data visualization concepts and strategies the earlier books have inspired in us.

I just delivered a multi-week project creating *beautiful* charts in Excel. I haven't made a chart in Excel in a decade. I couldn't have done it without your book. Thank you!