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I’m back from my vacation (boy, Seattle is really gorgeous during the summer!). Thanks to Sam Radakovitz (Sam Rad) for filling in for me while I was out. And thanks to Ben Rampson and Robin Wakefield for putting together this final post on charting improvements in Excel 2010.
In this post I’ll walk through some more of the new charting features available in Excel 2010. These include:
In Excel 2010, you can quickly display different data views directly on the PivotChart to visually analyze your numbers. In Excel 2007, we provided a modeless dialog which allowed you to pivot the chart but the inline buttons are a more intuitive way to do this which is why we moved back to this model.
For example, let’s look at the sales data for a bookstore chain. Below you can see a PivotChart showing the sales amount for each book genre at individual store locations. When looking at this data you can immediately see that Bellevue, which is represented by the blue column, is selling more than other store locations. Is this a normal trend? You can begin to investigate that directly on the chart by using the buttons available on the chart to filter the data down to each individual week. Just click on any button with a drop down icon to choose a filter and click OK.
After filtering the data down to each individual week you can determine if this holds true across all time periods or not.
After your analysis is complete you can remove these buttons in order to create a cleaner looking report, just select a PivotChart and go to PivotChart Tools \ Analyze tab. You can use the Show/Hide Field Buttons command to hide specific buttons on the chart or you have the option to hide all.
These options as well as the ability to change where the field appears on the PivotChart are also available in the right click menu of the buttons themselves.
Try them out and let us know what you think!
In Excel 2010 we have made enhancements to the formatting options in order to improve productivity and bring back some highly asked for features.
When upgrading the charting engine in Office 2007, there were some places where the 2007 application did not behave exactly the same as previous versions of Office charting. These subtle differences had the ability to alter the results of existing customer solutions. Much work was completed in Office 2007 SP2 to address common parity issues. In Office 2010 this work continued in the following area:
In Excel 2010 many of the data size limits on charts have been removed or increased to allow for larger data sets. As PCs become more powerful, we have found that users want to plot increasingly larger number of data points on their charts. Many of these requests come from scientists and analysts looking to spot outliers in huge amounts of data.
Comments: (7) Collapse
Excel's charting engine is falling behind, and falling behind big-time. I can't believe Microsoft isn't doing anything about it.
If you want to see "sparklines" implemented in Excel, then just check out sparklines-excel.blogspot.com or www.bonavistasystems.com.
Amazingly, Excel 2010 doesn't even come close to what these guys have done.
Then on the horizon there's Tableau. Surely you can see it's charts are better? Yet Microsoft does nothing?
"improve productivity and bring back some highly asked for features"
WOW....
Now lets look at things that are "Brought Back"
1) File Menu ...Oops Tab
blogs.technet.com/.../evolving-the-backstage-view.aspx
2) Double click on charts to get Format Dialog
3) Double click on Shapes/Pictures to get Format Dialog ...Umm maybe for 2014 for Shapes and 2016 for pictures...after all we need to have improvements in these versions as well
4) Chart Fill Patterns
5) Right Click to Customise the Interface... Very Crude...For better ideas talk to Andy Pope and download his Ribbon Customizer Beta
6) Menus + Toolbars - The No 2 Request on makeofficebetter.com/Excel - Umm lets leave that for 2020
All this leads me to belive that MS suffered from temporary amnesia after 2003 and had to re-discover their own product...
Based on our customer feedback, we needed to focus on the most critical visualization needs in Office 2010 which were: improving chart performance, increasing stability, improving backward compatibility, fixing several areas of conditional formatting, and adding support for Sparklines. These are all described in the recent Excel 2010 blog articles.
blogs.msdn.com/.../default.aspx
We are not claiming that this is enough to satisfy the pent-up demand for new visualization capabilities. Considerable effort has been underway to address these needs but it will take more than the Office 2010 release to fulfill them. In the meantime, we welcome future constructive discussions on this topic. The more concrete you can make the feedback the more easily we will be able to act on it.
Scott:
I have three significant problems with Excel 2007 charting, in order of decreasing severity:
* User Interface
* Backwards Incompatibility
* Performance
The user interface in 2007 is awkward, and seems as if it were designed to put familiar commands into the most undiscoverable places, and to maximize the effort needed to acomplish tasks. What follow are some examples.
- The Format Series dialog used to contain tabs for Data Labels and Error Bars, but now the user has to move away from where the work is being done to find them on the ribbon. Error Bars are not applied as intuitively as in 2003.
- Changing ranges in the Select Data and Error Bars dialogs requires a child dialog, and often the parent dialog is in the way, so the child must be closed, the parent moved, and the child reopened.
- Formatting of markers and lines in a line or XY series used to require one dialog tab, but now requires six.
These UI issues have been severe enough to prevent me from seriously considering full-time use of 2007, despite all the other goodness introduced in that version. The 2010 beta so far addresses none of my chart UI pain.
___
Backwards incompatibility shows up in several ways, most notably the different appearance of charts in 2007 compared to 2003. In addition, several techniques and workarounds needed to achieve special effects either do not work, or require more restrictive protocols. Some VBA commands work differently in 2007, for example, once optional arguments in the command to add custom error bars now must be specified. I haven't investigated enough to know how 2010 addresses these issues.
Performance was less of an issue to me personally, as my private datasets are not excessively large. When redrawing took a long time, I could always get another cup of coffee.
I have been impressed and pleased with the performance gains in Excel 2010 chart redrawing performance.
I would like to see the option to set the size of the major x-axis increment and major y-axis increment equal. [e.g. square log-log cycles]
Scott, I didn't have the chance to test Excel 2010.
I'm thrilled that you're adding sparklines to your offering. Although the concept has been around for a while, most users would only hear about it once it's in Excel.
So how about proposing other useful chart types? you'll tell me, a user that knows about, say, treemaps probably knows enough Excel to do them in VBA. True indeed, but how about those who were not aware of their existence? In comparison to the enormous amount of work that has been put into the development of Excel, adding new, tried-and-true chart types wouldn't be too much to ask. Or at least really basic ones, such as histograms or matrix charts.
Second, how about being more directive in the chart wizard (or whatever replaced it?). you and i know that 99% of the times, when a user chooses a pie chart, a radar or a surface chart from a list, they are doing their audience a disservice, as there is a clearer way of showing what they want (ie "show proportions", "compare values" or what not). Couldn't you help the non-expert users a bit more and ask the user what they are trying to do, then suggest an appropriate chart?
that would be awesome
thanks
jerome
Jon - thanks again for your feedback. We'll be touching base with you in the near future.
PDR - are you asking for the ability to set the x and y increment based on a function?
Jerome - those are all great requests which are definitely in line with where we would like to take the product.
Thanks,
Scott
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