Welcome to the Data to Decisions series, where we empower you with the skills to turn raw data into insightful visuals. In this blog, we’ll walk you through the process of building a stock price history chart in Microsoft Excel, one that is interactive and dynamic in nature. To analyze markets, mastering the art of charting stock prices is a crucial skill, with Excel and this tutorial, all that you need is a few minutes to build this amazing, stock chart! By the end of this post, you’ll be able to create a detailed and dynamic stock price history chart like the one featured above displaying M ..read more

Waterfall charts are a staple in the world of financial and business analysis, offering a structured visual representation of your data. These charts are particularly useful when you want to display how a metric or a key value has moved from one point to another, and what has contributed to the change (which can be either positive or negative). Consider a sample waterfall chart as shown below. The above chart shows how the employee count has changed from the beginning to the end of a year and what has contributed to the this change, in both positive and negative way. Consider another waterfal ..read more

This post is all about creating a progress tracker that can show the actual values against multiple target bins – a visual that can help your audience visualize the progress made easily against the bins under which the target is split. Check our previous post on creating a progress tracker against a maximum achievable goal of 100%. We have a dedicated YouTube video explaining the steps involved in creating this chart, check it here: This amazing visual can be created using Microsoft Excel in under a few minutes, let’s get started! Step 01: The sample data used in our example here i ..read more

Discover the elegance of simplicity with this Data to Decisions blog on creating a Matchstick Chart in Excel. This tutorial simplifies turning your data into clear, minimalist visuals that speak volumes and serve as a unique addition to your dashboards. This is an ideal replacement for traditional column charts to represent your metrics. Check the steps involved in creating this chart in our YouTube video: Building this in Microsoft Excel takes just a few minutes, let’s see how! Step 01: The sample data used in this blog is of customer satisfaction index of companies, as shown below (source ..read more

Elevate your data presentation with dynamic visuals that turn simple data into compelling visuals that quickly grab the attention of your audience. In this post from the Data to Decisions series, we’ll break down the steps to create an engaging Slider Chart in Excel. This chart is effective when you have actual values against a set target or a benchmark, where the target value is the same across your categories. We’ll also look at creating the different flavors of this chart by making slight modifications. Slider chart with icons as slidersSliders with borders The sample data used for this ch ..read more

This article in our Data to Decisions series walks you through a step-by-step process to effectively display Actual vs Budget vs Forecast data, complete with percentage variances, to bring clarity to your financial narratives and empower stakeholders with the insights needed for strategic planning and review. In Excel, with simple modifications to a column chart, this unique visualization can be built within minutes. The concept for this chart is originally from an article from excelcampus.com. Let’s get started! Check our detailed YouTube video on the same here: Step 01: Our sample dat ..read more

Let us create an insightful Actual vs. Target chart in Microsoft Excel, complete with variance indicators. A unique and great visualization for your reports to quickly grab the attention of your audience! An example chart of what we’ll build is shown below: Here, the actual values are columns while the targets are displayed as a diamond-arrowed line to the left. The variances are shown as red or green directional arrows for negative and positive values respectively. The inspiration for this chart is from pakaccountants.com who have a detailed article on creating this type of varianc ..read more

This post helps create a simple 100% stacked column chart which also displays the totals. A sample chart is shown below which we’ll create. To understand when or in which scenarios to use a 100% stacked column chart instead of a stacked column chart, let us look at the data used to create the above chart. The sample data is of customer feedback for a period of 6 years while the responses varied from Very Dissatisfied to Very Satisfied. Let us look at the Dissatisfied responses count for the years 2018 and 2023: they are the same, 13.  If this data is plotted on a stacked column chart th ..read more

This post teaches you the simplest method to create a small multiple-column chart, also known as a trellis chart or panel chart, which allows you to compare multiple categories of data side-by-side using similar scales and axes. They are handy for showing variations across different subgroups within your data. To understand this better, let’s look at the following small multiple chart which gives sales figures based on style and manufacturer: The key here is that the figures per manufacturer are shown against each style as a small multiple to the total sales. While the same can be viewed usin ..read more

Creating an Actual vs Target chart in Excel is a common task for visually comparing performance metrics. Adding variances with arrow indicators can enhance the chart’s ability to convey whether actual figures are above or below targets quickly. The below chart is an example of displaying actual versus target and variances displayed with arrows. This article is about building this amazing chart in Excel in a few easy steps. Let’s get started! Do check our dedicated video on YouTube explaining these steps in detail. Step 01: Let us consider sample data of actuals and the targets of a metric ac ..read more