A Chart is Worth a Thousand Cells !

Excel has options to create some great non-conventional charts. For this post, I have tried to compile some real life examples for some of these charts. So here goes !

Bubble Chart

I came across this interesting bubble chart that maps movie release date (X), movie budget (Y) and Worldwide gross earnings (Z - the size of the bubble)

http://bit.do/e5sqS

While the site does not provide the data that was used to create this chart, the following website does have all the data that you need to recreate this kind of chart in excel. You need to copy name of the movie, release date, production budget and worldwide release data columns into excel and give it a shot !

https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets/all

While on the subject of bubble charts, why not visit gapminder.org - a free interactive data visualization tool based on reliable public data. They have an interesting bubble chart that displays life expectancy, GDP income and population revealing a startling fact that people from rich countries live longer. Play around with other data options like changing population to income for bubble sizes. It's interactive and fun !

http://bit.do/e5ssA

There is another bubble chart created by UNEP that shows wealth and per capita CO2 emissions. 

Treemap Chart

This example of a tree map chart comes from the World Bank which analyses country wise trade data (import /export). When  you visit this site do  try "other visualizations" and press the download button to get the data. Try creating this chart yourself in excel using the downloaded data.

http://wits.worldbank.org/visualization/country-analysis-visualization.html 

Radar Chart or Spider Chart ( looks like a spiders web doesn't it !)

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) presents this great radar chart which helps compare a countries performance on five indicators and compare it with global average. Interestingly, the source of this chart is called a traffic light table (remember constitutional formatting!) . Have a look ( scroll down halfway)

https://www.oecd.org/dev/migration-development/knomad-dashboard.htm

Another interesting radar chart as part of a research paper comparing three technologies. Read just above and below the graph for an interpretation of the chart

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-25718-1_12#Fig3 

Sunburst Chart ( Nested Pie Chart)

Sunburst chart shows hierarchical data. An interesting example is as follows.

Example  : Energy Consumption and Energy Sources for some countries

If you wish to try out this chart in excel, you will have to type out this data ( Yes !) as shown in the picture on the right ( click on the pic to enlarge).

Waterfall Chart

Waterfall charts are great to show postive and negative cumulative totals like cash flows etc.

Example - Cash Flows Analysis

Example - Cash Flows With Totals 


I hope this post helps in providing some additional insights into some unconventional charts and creating better data visualizations.

😊