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This post is brought to you by Scott Ruble , Senior Program Manager in Excel.
Over the last year, we’ve written a number of articles on the new capabilities of Excel 2010. Several of these were related to new charting features in Office 2010. Here is a quick list of them.
· More Charting Enhancements in Excel 2010
· Improvements to Chart Performance
· Chart Object Model in Word & PowerPoint
These improvements were well received; however, we understand there is a pent up need for many additional capabilities. As such, we are beginning the process of planning the next release of Office and would like to solicit your input.
At this time, I want to focus on new types of visualizations that you would like Office to support in the future. There has been a lot of innovation in the industry over the last several years – things ranging from tag clouds to Voronoi TreeMaps. However, I’m sure many of you are aware that we have not added any new chart types for several releases. This is a trend we would like to change.
Please provide us feedback on the questions below but feel free to add additional details. This information will be used as a starting point to better understand scenarios and trends.
1. Types of Visualizations What visualization types are you using that aren’t native to Excel or Office? These could be provided by addins, competitive products, or creative workarounds to our current chart types.
2. Scenarios For what purposes are you using these visualizations? In essence, how and why are you using them?
3. Examples Can you provide any examples (screen shots or descriptions) of the visualization types you are using?
4. Follow-up Could we contact you to further explore your usage of these visualization types? Please provide your contact information by emailing us directly.
While I’m sure you have many other great ideas for new features, I’d like to keep this discussion focused on new types of visualizations. In future articles, we may be soliciting your feedback on other areas.
Comments: (14) Collapse
Stacked charts (peltiertech.com/.../StackedCharts.html)
Great idea for a discussion!
I would like to see more bubble chart options, including more graceful handling of the first step of properly identifying the data series, but then more control on the axis (both numeric and categorical), and perhaps category/threshold based color coding of bubbles.
In addition, making pivot charts less horrible looking (i.e. actually retaining formatting changes when the chart is redrawn) would go a long way.
In terms of inspiration, I have been impressed by much on ManyEyes (manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes).
I am trying to use the SUMIFS function within two different tabs in a worksheet but it is coming up with an error. I use the sumif to pull in a column of information to look at a certain cell and sum them together but I have two criteria. Does this make sense? Would you be able to help me create the correct function to make this work?
Very clearly the most useful, and something that should not be too difficult is a bridge (or waterfall chart). One very easy, with blocks up and down with different colors and the end of one is the start of the next.
I'm not sure if this is already available but I can't find a way to produce a 3D stacked bar chart for different individual.
For example, if you have a sales team of 3 people and each can sell one of 5 items, would it be possible to create a stacked bar chart showing how many items of each type each person sells with the total height of each 3D bar representing the total numeber sold (all 5 items). I can produce this for an individual but not for a team.
Many thanks
A few very useful types which can be constructed only with very longwinded workarounds and "helper" calculations:
- Bullet charts: a single bar against one or more shaded background regions (for thresholds, eg performance boundaires) and one or two markers (eg for target and previous period values). Very dense information for KPIs, dashboards etc. Would probably need series to be in very specific arrangement (as with stock charts). Might fit better next to sparklines as an "in cell" visualisation rather than full blown chart, but that might lose some of the flexibility of formatting.
- Small multiples / panel charts / trellis charts: rather than showing a third variable in 3D (AAGH!) allow user to create several sub-charts with each one split according to this variable. eg charts for sales through time, split across 5 regions, or 7 products, or 19 sales people. This would be a great extension to PivotChart functionality - rather than filtering by these criteria one value at a time, allow splitting instead. User will need to have some control over layout (eg how many charts per row / column in the grid, order of charts especially ranking). Should be made easy to keep consitent formatting, axis values etc between all charts, and should resize seamlessly as a group. While these sorts of arrangments can be done they either require tedious manual processing or VBA. Neither lends itself to the sort of rapid analytics flexibility a PivotChart should provide.
- Box (and whisker) plots. Again, I can create these with lots of intermediate steps and overlaid chart types, but if I want to plot median, +/-25%, +/-50% or a mean +/- 1 std dev, +/- 3 deviations I should be able to do that without having to calculate all the related values, since it is all in the data (unlike stock charts, where the values are not related). Provide choices of using mean / median and associated choices for percentile ranges or number of deviations from mean.
More generally, a bit more intellisense around choice of how quantitative axes are labelled. Don't just format numbers the same as individual data values are displayed in the source, but intelligently choose to drop the decimal places, or even auto-format as thousands or millions when the major units lend themselves to this. Add options for axis number format to show "thousandTHs" or "millionTHs" as well. No matter what auto-number-formatting is provided, allow the user to manually override (as is the case now, and to retain backwards-compatibility of the resulting chart), and possibly an application-wide setting to turn this off (for control freaks like me!)
Hope these ideas make it at least as far as a review board!
Another more general thought - a really useful feature (especially for line and XY charts) would be the ability to select a series, choose to add labels to data points, and select "only first" or "only last" point. Apply this dynamically as the data set changes (eg as additional month is added, or previous one drops off due to filtering or manual changes). This means a legend could be replaced by a more useful label (nearer to the related item in the chart, taking less eye movement and less working memory to process, and inherently in the same order as the series appear on the chart).
Currently attaching labels to first point usually works OK, but not if that point gets dropped, likewise last point very often is dynamic especially for time series data as new values are added. Either way, doing this by hand is annoying. Making this a property of the series rather than a single point may make more sense to user, but the actual label will be attached to the data point in the usual way, allowing for backward compatibility.
Scatter (XY) charts: provide changes in colour of data points according to a third quantitative variable.
This would be more powerful in many cases than varying size of data points like a bubble chart, and less cluttered / overlapping when some points relate to huge values in the third variable.
Easiest option would be through a control rather like colour gradient conditional formatting. This gives user ability to allow automatic colour variations across whole range of data being plotted, or provide specific thresholds by percentile or hard values, or formulae. From a usability point of view, good choices would be to vary a single hue according to intensity, but that should be down to the user. If they want to scale from magenta to lime via black, who am I to say that is wrong?!
Related: Currently when plotting multiple series on an XY, data points are shown by default with different shapes and colours (according to the third categorical variable implied by multiple series). While this makes them easy to distinguish, it also adds some visual bias as some symbols have much more "weight" of ink than others (eg solid squares, circles far heavier then X or cross). Manually changing every series is tedious, having an option through layout or design to choose "vary by symbol only", "vary by colour only", "vary both" would be useful.
Also, a very useful symbol to add to the list would be a hollow circle to assist with crowded charts and occlusion.
I want to put my opinion in stacked charts, waterfall charts, dynamic data labeling first and last visible point in a series, and setting color of a series via a third variable (by point as described or whole series so you can make sure that multiple charts graphing different things can stay "synced" so Option A is always green even if you don't have them in the same order when you setup the graph). I also would like to see if there is more general conditional formatting that could be applied to graphics. Lastly, I haven't tried 2010 yet, but the macro recorder in 2007 hardly does anything with charts when it worked better (not ideal) for 2003 and earlier.
Ability to export to graphic file formats would be very nice - and with high resolution (1200 dpi) - suited for professional print media. The following fomrats would be very welcome: EPS, JPEG-2000, PNG, TIF (WIthout compression), AI (Adobe Illustrator).
Please reinstall the pattern fills (e.g., hatch marks) for charts! The gradient, picture, or texture fill microsoft opted for is NOT useful for publishing material in B&W. I have read there is an add-in, but I can't get it to work. This should be part of the mainstream excel - NOT an add-in.
@2nd etc... macro recorder is massively improved in 2010. Chart stuff seems to be fixed, but I have not exhaustively tested.
@Publishing charts - pattern fills are back in 2010 already, no add-in required for this version
Hey Microsoft dudes, Please keep an eye on
chandoo.org/.../new-charts-poll
where lots of great ideas have been posted
I'd like to add
Please bring back Interactive Goal Seek by dragging chart points ! ! !
Comments: (loading) Collapse