Excel Video 134 covers two tricks I used to make the scrolling chart work, a formatting trick and a formula. The formatting trick is easy once you know how custom formatting works. Follow along with the video to see how to get into the custom format screen and then...

Excel Video 133 spotlights one more cool chart before we move on to other Excel topics. Credit for this idea goes to Bill Jelen and his Charts and Graphs for Microsoft Excel 2010 book. In this video I’ll give you an idea of how a scrolling chart works. In coming Excel...

Excel Video 132 continues our discussion about getting charts onto dashboards. In the last Excel Video, we moved a chart onto the dashboard. You may choose instead to copy and paste the chart onto the dashboard. The pasted chart is still linked to live data, but now...

Excel Video 131 contrasts two ways to get your charts onto a dashboard. The Move Chart button does just that, it moves your chart either onto a separate chart page or as an object in a spreadsheet. When you move a chart, the chart is still attached to your data. As...

Excel Video 130 is much simpler than the last Excel Video. Now that we’ve used the frequency function to calculate the frequency of our data, here’s a trick to make your column chart look more like frequency than discrete data. The trick is to right-click the data...

Excel Video 129 uses the frequency function to group data into ranges or buckets. Frequency is an array function. If you haven’t seen arrays, they work differently than traditional Excel functions. To tell Excel you’re entering an array formula, you need to hit...

Excel Video 128 introduces Pie of Pie Charts. A Pie of Pie Chart is simply a pie chart with a secondary pie chart that shows the detail of a portion of the primary pie chart. Often you’ll have data where a couple of categories make up most of the total followed by a...

Excel Video 127 explodes a pie chart. In Excel-speak, exploding a slice (or more) of a pie chart is a way to separate the slice(s) from the main pie. You can control how far away from the pie that slices explode to get just the effect and emphasis you need. There’s...

Excel Video 126 is a quick look at two ways you can help users quickly focus on the critical information in a chart and draw appropriate conclusions. Today’s chart shows the year-to-date percentage of block time used by a practice. Let’s look at two ways to emphasize...

Excel Video 125 shows you how to replace the standard chart colors with a picture from your clipboard. The next time you want your physicians to really notice a chart, replace the standard fill colors with a picture. When you chart with a picture, it may be harder to...

Excel Video 124 demonstrates how to add a second y axis to a chart. In this example, we’re charting collection dollars and the percent of billed charges on the same chart. The collections each month are hundreds of thousands of dollars while the percentage of billed...

Excel Video 123 introduces the idea of putting different types of chart series on the same chart. Today we’ll add two line series to a column chart. To add the series, I simply copied the data and pasted it into my chart. Once the data’s in the chart, I right-clicked...

Excel Video 122 uses a trick we learned in speedometers to make a column chart appear to float on the page. Today we’re plotting the range of wait times for a physician clinic. After we have the high and the low wait time for the day plotted on the chart, we’ll add...

Excel Video 121 demonstrates some additional things you can do with a speedometer chart. We’re not going to get into all of the details and work through complicated examples, but I do want you to see how you can add an outer dial to a speedometer to show labels like...

Excel Video 120 finishes our speedometer by adding the needle. To put the needle on the speedometer, you need to add another data series to the chart. Fortunately, we set up all of the information we needed in Excel Video 117, so we just need to add that data to the...

Excel Video 119 builds the outside ring of the speedometer chart. The trick to getting the outside of the speedometer chart to work is to select a doughnut chart as the chart type and then change the colors and rotate the doughnut. I’ll show you two different ways to...

Excel Video 118 is designed to set up the data entry for our speedometer chart. The key to understanding the structure of the data is to recognize that we’re plotting the data on circular charts and will hide the bottom half of the chart later on. That means we’re...

Excel Video 117 introduces speedometer charts in Excel. Speedometer charts, like the thermometer charts we looked at last time, are a visual way to represent one variable in Excel. Speedometer charts tend to take up a fair amount of space in a dashboard, but they can...

Excel Video 116 walks through the steps to create a thermometer chart. Thermometers don’t show trends, but are a good visual way to track a single variable, like progressing toward a goal. This video went a little longer than most Excel Videos since I tried to show...

Excel Video 115 adds some formatting tricks around the Sparkline to make it look more like a small chart. Sometimes you’ll want a dashboard to have something bigger than a Sparkline but smaller than a chart. Watch Excel Video 115 to get some ideas on how to make a...