Jorge Camoes’ Charts

I just added a poll to the sidebar on the right (RSS readers might need to visit the site to see it). I’d like to know if you use recorded macros or write VBA in Excel.
I ran an informal poll among friends and colleagues with catastrophic results and I’d like to compare results.
Please add a […]

Do you need VBA to create an Excel dashboard? Should you take the plunge and go beyond Excel formulas? Well, I think you should, but feel free to disagree. Charley Kyd, commenting on my review of his e-book, disagrees:
As a consultant, I visited too many clients where an Excel user had written some macros, used […]

These are 10 basic tips for column and bar chart design:

A column chart is not a skyline: if you can’t see the individual patterns, consider removing some series or create several smaller charts;
If you are charting categorical data sort the columns; if there is more than one series, allow the user to sort the data […]

Jon Peltier’s site is usually my first stop when I want to find a solution for an Excel chart problem. His site is one of the best resources for add-ins, tips, tricks and “impossible charts”. Now he’s sharing his expertise with us in his new blog. So if you want to go beyond basic […]

Following the 10 x 10 post series on tips for better charts, these are the 10 tips for line charts:

Don’t use line markers unless you really need them to identify b&w printed charts;
Don’t use a legend; directly label the series, instead;
If you can’t easily see the pattern of each series you may have too […]

How do you create a map like the one above for your next presentation if you don’t have a mapping tool? Simple, create it in Excel. Easier said than done, right? Well, not really…
Following the “geo-scatterplot”, in this screencast tutorial I’ll show you how to create a thematic map and color-code it, based on your […]

If you google for “Excel dashboards”, 6 out of the first 10 results link to Charley Kyd’s ExcelUser website or some of his affiliates. MrExcel calls Charley Kyd “the king of Excel dashboards”.
There is a good reason for that. Three years ago, Charley Kyd published an e-book, Dashboard Reporting with Excel, probably one of the […]

Excel is a great (but underrated) BI tool. Several BI vendors gave up fighting it and offer Excel add-ins as front-ends for their BI solutions. So, if you want to create a dashboard you should consider Excel, since it really offers better functionalities than many other applications for a fraction of the […]

I tried to create a Crystal XCelsius version of my Demographic Dashboard and failed miserably. But what about a new spreadsheet version? That should work, right? Wrong. I downloaded StarOffice 8 and just linked the pivot table (”datapilot”) to the Access population database via ODBC and waited… and waited… and waited… and finally […]

This is the last post in a series where I examined the possibility of creating a Crystal Xcelsius dashboard using my Demographic Dashboard as a benchmark. I’ll discuss here my overall conclusions.
I must say from the start that I am very disappointed.
Let’s start by the data set and Xcelsius integration with Excel. I struggle everyday […]