Count birthdays by month
You would think you could use the COUNTIF function to count birthdays, but the trouble is COUNTIF only works with ranges, and won't let you use something like MONTH to extract just the month number from...Read more
Dave Bruns
Popular college degrees for women
I was looking at an article on forbes.com about popular college degrees for women and men. They listed 9 degrees for both women and men (on many, many pages), and this chart is just a mash-up of the data they cited, sorted to show popular degrees for women at the top.
The chart type is 100% stacked bar, and its a good example of how a bar charts can accommodate extremely long labels. The data used in the chart looks like this:
Top 15 Countries by Life Expectancy
Which countries have the longest life expectancy? Bar charts work well for this kind of data because (1) the bars are easy to compare and (2) there is plenty of room for labels on the vertical axis.
Here is the data used to plot this chart:
Data validation unique values only
Data validation rules are triggered when a user adds or changes a cell value. In this example, we are using a formula that checks that the input doesn't already exist in the named range "emails":
COUNTIF(ids,B5)<2
COUNTIF returns a...Read more
Survey results favorite ice cream flavor
Pie charts are one of the simplest chart types in Excel, good for showing "part-to-whole" relationships with data in a small number of categories. Pie charts get a lot of criticism in the professional data visualization world, but they are compact and effective when the number of categories is small (2-5) and the relative size of each category is clear. In this example, a pie chart is used to plot the results of the survey question "What's your favorite flavor of ice cream?".
The data used for this pie chart is below:
Quarterly sales by clustered region
This chart shows quarterly sales data, broken down by quarter into four regions plotted with clustered columns.Clustered column charts work best when the number of data series and categories is limited. In order to make the data labels fit into a narrow space, the chart uses a custom number format ([>=1000]#,##0,"K";0) to show values in thousands.
The data used to plot this chart is shown below:
Quarterly sales by stacked region
This chart shows quarterly sales, broken down by quarter into four regions that are stacked, one on top of the other. Stacked column charts can work well when the number of data series and categories is limited. This chart also shows how to use a custom number format ([>=1000]#,##0,"K";0) to show values in thousands.
The data used to plot this chart is shown below:
Income statement annual data
Income statements are commonly shown in a combo chart, with columns plotting revenue and net income, and a line showing the profit margin as a percentage. You can see examples of this on Google's finance pages. This kind of chart is easy to make in later versions of Excel by inserting a combo chart.
The data used to create this chart is shown below:
Products this year vs last year
Bar and column charts are great for comparing things, because it's easy to see how bar lengths differ. This chart is an example of a clustered column chart showing product units sold this year versus last year. The data used for this chart looks like this on the worksheet:
Product mix this year vs last year
Bar charts are great for comparing things, because it's easy to see how bar lengths differ. This chart is an example of a clustered bar chart showing product units sold this year versus last year. The data used for this chart looks like this on the worksheet:
