Excel 365
How to create a simple Bullet graph in Excel
A bullet graph (the name by its inventor Stephen Few) or bullet chart (in
Microsoft office) generally is used to display progress towards the specific target:
How to evaluate startup or new business plans
Let's suppose you have three different business plans that were presented to receive startup
business loans with the repayment term of one year. They all look well crafted, with realistic
and robust goals for the rapid development of their business. A decision that you need to make
is which of the submitted projects will receive approval for the startup loans. There are
several ways to compare different business plans, and each of them has its advantages.
How to plot investment opportunity zones in Excel
If you start a new business, create a new product, or change a business model, break-even
analysis lets you find out at what stage your company, product, or service will become
profitable. Break-even point is the stage where you have no profit yet but have no
loss already. However, there are many preceding and following stages important for the
investor. The investor wants to know not only how quickly the initial investments will pay off,
and extra income will be received, but also how quickly the normal profit and the economic profit
will be earned.
How to create a break-even chart in Excel
A revenue the company generates from selling the products or providing the services should cover the
fixed costs, variable costs, and leave a contribution margin. The point where the total operating
margin (the difference between the price of the product or service and the variable costs per item
or customer) covers the fixed costs is called a break-even point.
Creating a drop-down list in a cell
Manual data entry into spreadsheets and especially entering data into text cells
leads to many errors. Excel data validation tools allow you to reduce the inaccuracy
of Excel data entry by restricting the set of possible values to a pre-defined list.
Users can select the item from a drop-down list with few choices, instead of typing
text into the data entry form template.
Change the decimal point to a comma or vice versa
When you import data into Excel spreadsheets from Internet pages or CSV files, Excel fails to
recognize some numbers and converts them to the default text type. Temporarily changing Excel
settings helps to reduce the amount of manual work and the number of errors on replacing comma
to point, dot to comma, semicolon to comma, etc. Also, you need to change decimal delimiter
settings for printing or exporting data for international users.
Creating Pie of Pie and Bar of Pie charts
Excel pie charts are useful to display fractions of a whole by splitting a circle into
sections. Each section looks like a slice of a pie and represents a category. Such
a layout makes it easy to observe relationships between parts, but the smaller becomes
the slice (less than 10%) – the harder becomes to estimate it visually.
How to add labels to the mosaic plot
This is the third and last part of the tip
How to create a mosaic plot in
Excel
(the second part is
How to create a
step Area chart for the Mosaic plot in Excel).
The step area chart created in the previous part has invalid labels for both axes and
no data labels:
How to create a step Area chart for the Mosaic plot in Excel
This is a second part of the tip
How to create a mosaic plot in
Excel. The first part describes how to prepare the data for the step Area chart created in
this part.
How to create a mosaic plot in Excel
Pie and bar charts greatly simplify the understanding of percentages distribution for
one categorical variable but fail to build a meaningful representation of two and more
variables. A quite recent innovation in data visualization real is the Mosaic plot,
which helps to grasp the correlations within marketing, sales, and other financial data.
You will not find this chart among Excel standard charts, but you can build one.