Excel Charts: Visualization Secrets for Impressive Charts
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Try Udemy for Business- Significantly improve your Excel reports to create more powerful graphs that communicate your information in the best manner
- Learn creative & simple techniques that allow you to create your own Excel charts from scratch
- Create dynamic Excel charts. Why? To save time! I have seen many cases where people are unnecessarily manually updating graphs. This costs considerable time and nerves.
- Impress your management by including new Excel graphs in your reports (such as my Pin chart for variances)
- Apply Best Practice methods to considerably improve the design of your Excel charts and tables
- Apply techniques that highlight chart and table elements to direct the reader attention where it is needed most
- Use effective Chart Combinations that are pivotal to management reports
- Apply best methods to compare performance in your Excel graphs: as in Actual data versus Budget, forecasts and previous year
- Learn by doing. Download the Demo Excel Workbook and follow each section with me. Once you complete a section, you will do an exercise to test your understanding. Learning by doing works best!
- Learn advanced Excel lookup methods (such as matrix lookups) which you can use in your larger data files. The methods learnt in Behind the scenes secrets of dynamic charts can be applied to many other areas.
- Become the Excel data Visualization star in your department by creating impressive Excel charts and graphs in your reports
- Existing experience and knowledge of Excel's basic charting options and formulas
- This course is aimed for current intermediate to advanced Excel users and will significantly build on existing knowledge
- Demonstration is done using Excel 2010. However, the focus of this training is to teach you new methods of doing things which you can do regardless of the Excel version you have
Without Doubt, With This Advanced Microsoft Excel Chart Course, You will be the Excel data Visualization star in your Department!
Significantly Improve your Reports by using Advanced Excel Graph Techniques.
This Course Includes:
Downloadable Workbook to follow the demonstrations (and use the charts as your templates).
Downloadable Exercise Book (answers included).
Full set of Cheat Sheets for download in Lecture 3. This PDF document is a quick reference guide for whenever you need to create any of the charts in this training.
If you use Excel to generate reports and graphs, my hands-on Excel training provides you with an extremely advanced toolkit worth of knowledge that will take the design of your Excel charts, tables and reports to the next level. It will provide you with the best tricks to create dynamic charts. It will save you tons of time of manually updating your Excel graphs on a monthly basis. The visualization techniques introduce you to some unusual methods to handle and create charts which will enhance readability of your reports as well as impress your readers.
Lauren says: "I wish she had more courses on advanced excel and access that are formatted like this one. She frames the content in ways that are applicable to my current job. I will be able to improve my current processes and project turnaround time as well as the look/feel of my tables and charts."
John says: "Leila does a fantastic job of walking you thru the process of creating various charts from scratch. From which formula to use to step by step chart creation. As a bonus you have actual exercises to practice your new skills, Absolutely one of the best instructional courses I have taken"
Paul says: "Course is clear, to the point and very dynamic. Excellent!"
Types of Excel Charts & Excel Graphs are presented:
The content and type of Excel charts presented are those that are typical to corporate reporting. Given my background in controlling, finance and project management, I designed the training with this audience in mind and the typical methods used to report, communicate, analyze, check and plan quantitative information.
If you are a student taking this course, rest assured that you are well equipped with advanced Excel visualization & chart design techniques to impress any employer who requires you to create graphs & reports in Excel.
Demonstration will be done using Excel 2010, but all methods will be compatible with older as well as future versions of Excel unless otherwise stated in the video. My main focus is to introduce you to new “methods” of doing things which you can do no matter which Excel version you have.
Why this course is different to other Excel courses:
I will not only demonstrate to you, but you
will be able to follow each demonstration in your own Excel workbook. To make sure you have understood the
techniques, you will complete an exercise at the end of each section (answers are included but you have to try on your own first).
I place great value on keeping the training not only informative but also interesting. I know technical courses can be boring, especially when taken online. For this reason, I have mixed screen-casts together with talking head and flip chart type of demonstrations to get it as close to a classroom training style as possible.
I have also been told by many students that I have the ability to explain complex topics in an easy to understand manner. I think you will benefit from that.
This course is split to 5 major parts:
Methods to effectively communicate and present data trends – In this section I will also provide you with a crash course in best practices for table and graph design.
Behind the scenes secrets of dynamic charts in Excel, where I introduce you to key functions you need to use to never manually update your Excel charts again –The functions you learn here go beyond graphs and charts. They enable you to do complex look ups in large data tables.
Techniques that highlight Excel chart and table elements to direct the reader attention where it is needed most.
New ways to compare performance: as in Actual data versus Budget, forecasts and previous year
Effective Chart Combinations that are pivotal to management reports
This is an Excel Advanced Chart Course BUT you will be surprised how simple the techniques are once you know them!
- Controller or financial analyst responsible for creating monthly, quarterly or yearly reports
- Finance or department manager looking for new effective visualization methods
- A student planning to work as a business or financial analyst or in any function that will require data visualization
- All in all, if you’re responsible for presenting your data graphically and you need to do this with Excel, you will benefit from the methods I teach in this course
Watch this free preview to obtain a good understanding about the content and structure of my advanced Excel Chart course.
The attached cheat sheets provide brief and simple instructions to help you quickly create the charts in this course.
Watching the videos and following along in the Excel Demo Workbook and completing the exercises is an important part of learning. If you don’t use it immediately, you will forget. Since it’s unlikely you’ll be creating all the Excel charts in one go, these cheat sheets will help you when you get stuck. Whenever you’re not sure what the next step is, refer to them.
Sometimes we also forget what type of charts are available for us. This quick guide gives you with a good overview.
Learn best practices on how to create Excel charts with an impact. It takes you through the methods that will help your readers to understand the message of your charts faster and not waste time trying to figure it out. It also shows you what you should avoid when designing charts.
Many people update their charts manually, never knowing that Excel can actually do the work for them! This section provides you with a good overview on what Excel is actually capable of when it comes to dynamic charts. Each of the topics mentioned here will be discussed in the next 4 sections.
This lecture introduces you to the main advanced Excel functions that will provide you with dynamic and interactive charts. These functions also go beyond charts. They can be used to create interactive dashboards, dynamic reports and advanced lookups. The next 4 sections take you through each function in more detail.
INDEX & MATCH is one of my favorite functions. It's actually two functions used as one. It can do complex lookups. It can help you create dynamic dashboards and dynamic charts. I have dedicated a whole section to this to make sure I do it justice.
Having learnt how to use INDEX & MATCH, you learn here how to create dynamic ranges for your Excel charts. For example, how you can add a drop-down and based on the selection, the chart values & categories change. This provides an interactive-dashboard look to your reports.
Avoid Excel's default legends whenever possible. For example, if you have two line series, position the series labels, right by the series and remove the default legend. This creates a leaner, more elegant and easy to interpret chart. You can also do this if you have stacked column charts. The trick is not to do this manually - which most people do by using text boxes - but instead to use some smart formulas and methods that lets Excel do the work for you.
When the length of your time series is changing - for example as you add data for the next months -, you need your series label to move with your line. To avoid any manual work, follow the tips and tricks shown in this section. This is the only time I like errors in my formulas!
In this lecture, you will learn how to position the legend (stacked series labels) dynamically for a stacked column chart. We will do this using formulas and smart techniques. Your readers will benefit from having the label of the stack right beside it and no longer need to look at the legend and match the color with the color of the stacks. Time-saving for everyone!
Sometimes it makes sense to add a comment or annotation inside your Excel chart to highlight a specific event. For example you started a marketing campaign or introduced a new product and would like to direct the reader attention to this section or use it as an explanation for your data point. This lecture not only shows you how to add annotations to your chart but also how to make these dynamic so that once your data point shifts, the annotation moves with it.
It also uses the functions we learnt in Secrets to Dynamic Charts to create a mega dashboard effect!
Excel tables are used when you'd like to show exact values and compare specific values with one another. In this section you will learn how you can get the most out of your Excel data tables and direct reader attention where it's needed most. Two techniques are shown in this section
- Use symbols in tables
- Use Excel's Conditional Formatting feature
This lecture shows you how to use Excel's Conditional Formatting feature to format table rows differently depending on a certain criteria. Conditional Formatting can be tricky sometimes but all you need to do is to watch out for one key setting, which is explained in this lecture.
This lecture shows you how to use Conditional Formatting to make certain parts of your table stand out so that it is easier to read and digest. The Smart formatting techniques help emphasize the sections of your report that need attention most. To ensure you do not have too much color everywhere, you can use a threshold.
This lecture provides you with an overview of different methods used for visualizing performance comparisons, deviations, as well as future estimated performance. It introduces you to the topics and charts that you will learn in this section as well as the next two sections.
This is specially required if the range for your line series chart is based on an Excel data table that has formulas and you would like to cut the line series in the middle. Using the common "" in your formulas does not work as the line series will crash all the way down to the X-axis. You will have to use a special trick to get to "break" your line series. Watch this lecture to see how.
One really effective and neat way of showing Actual to Budget variances for different categories such as products, departments or companies is to present it as a bar chart and show the variance to budget using thinner bars. When Actual is above Budget, the difference is shown as green and when Actual is below Budget, it is shown in red. The variance amount is also shown as a percentage. Watch this lecture to see what this "professional" method is all about.
note: it does involve my favorite trick!
In this lecture you will learn another effective method to show Actual data and the Variance to Budget. The method includes two bar charts that are positioned beside each other and the bars are "connected" using subtle lines that connect the bars from the chart representing Actual data to the Variance chart. It uses three different techniques covered in this course and brings them all together creatively to get a great impact.
In this lecture you will learn how to create a vertical bullet chart using percentage values (e.g. productivity, efficiency). Bullet charts are great when you want to compare performance not just against target but also be able to deduce if performance was within an "unacceptable", "acceptable" or "Great" range.
If you'd like to create a vertical bullet chart using absolute values instead of percentages you need to watch this lecture. Since we use the primary and the secondary axis, we need to tweak things a bit to ensure they have the same minimum and maximum values.