Make Beautiful Excel Charts Like The Economist (file included)
Summary
TLDRThe video script offers a step-by-step guide on recreating visually appealing charts akin to those found in The Economist, using Excel. It covers the creation of a 100% stacked bar chart, a dumbbell chart, and a color-coded frequency table, all of which can be dynamically updated with Excel's features. The tutorial also highlights the use of Think-Cell, an add-in that streamlines the process of creating and updating charts in PowerPoint, promising significant time savings and ease of use for business presentations.
Takeaways
- 📊 **Replicating The Economist-Style Charts in Excel:** The video provides a step-by-step guide on how to create charts similar to those published in The Economist within Excel, focusing on a dynamic and professional design.
- 🚀 **Sponsor Acknowledgment:** Think-Cell is acknowledged as the sponsor of the video, offering a solution to reduce time spent on PowerPoint presentations and being trusted by 90% of Fortune 500 companies.
- 🔄 **Dynamic Data Representation:** The tutorial emphasizes the importance of setting up charts in a dynamic way, allowing for easy updates and changes to reflect in the chart automatically.
- 📈 **Customizing Bar Charts:** A bar chart is customized by placing category titles on top and adjusting colors, labels, and axis to mirror a design style seen in The Economist.
- 🔗 **Linked Data and Titles:** The video demonstrates how to link chart titles to specific cells, ensuring that any changes in the titles are automatically reflected in the chart.
- 📊 **Creating Dumbbell Charts:** A method for creating dumbbell charts, also known as connected dot plots, is explained, which is useful for showing changes or comparisons between two periods.
- 🎯 **Scatter Plot Utilization:** The video uses a scatter plot to create a dumbbell chart, transforming non-numeric category labels into numeric positions to fit the requirements of a scatter plot.
- 🔴 **Error Bars for Connection:** Error bars are used to create connecting lines in the dumbbell chart, with customization for positive and negative changes.
- 🌈 **Color-Coded Data Visualization:** A non-traditional chart resembling a heat map is recreated, using color-coded cells to represent different categories of data, such as complaint frequencies.
- 🔧 **Excel Table Functionality:** The script highlights the use of Excel tables to ensure dynamic data visualizations update automatically when new data is added.
- 🖼️ **Incorporating Shapes and Icons:** The video shows how to insert custom shapes and icons into Excel cells to represent categories in a visually appealing and easily understandable manner.
- 🔄 **Transposing Data for Visuals:** The UNIQUE and TRANSPOSE functions are used to organize data in a specific layout for creating visually appealing and informative charts.
Q & A
What is the main topic of the video?
-The main topic of the video is how to create charts in Excel that resemble those found in The Economist, with a focus on replicating three specific types of charts.
Which company is sponsoring the video?
-Think-Cell is the company sponsoring the video.
What is unique about the first chart featured in the video?
-The first chart is unique because it is a bar chart where the titles for each category are on top instead of on the side, which makes it more compact and easier to understand.
How does the video adapt the first chart for a corporate context?
-The video adapts the first chart for a corporate context by using it to compare the number of parts sourced from China and the United States by a manufacturing company.
What is a dumbbell chart or connected dot plot used for?
-A dumbbell chart or connected dot plot is used to emphasize change or compare values between two different periods.
How does the video create a dynamic visual for the second chart?
-The video creates a dynamic visual for the second chart by using a scatter plot with error bars to represent the change between two periods, and then adding labels and formatting to improve clarity.
What is the main benefit of using Think-Cell for PowerPoint presentations?
-The main benefit of using Think-Cell for PowerPoint presentations is that it can significantly reduce the time spent on creating and updating slides, allowing for auto-updating charts and easy management of slide elements.
How does the third visual in the video differ from a traditional heat map?
-The third visual in the video differs from a traditional heat map because it uses color-coded cells based on categories rather than a gradient of colors to represent data.
What method does the video suggest for creating a dynamic visual for the third chart?
-The video suggests using an Excel table with XLOOKUP functions and inserting shapes as illustrations to create a dynamic visual for the third chart.
How does the video ensure that the created visuals in Excel are dynamic?
-The video ensures that the visuals are dynamic by using Excel tables and functions like XLOOKUP, which automatically update when new data is added.
What additional resource is mentioned for learning about creating business charts in Excel?
-The video mentions a new Business Charts course where viewers can learn to create charts that resemble those from McKinsey in Excel.
Outlines
📊 Replicating The Economist-Style Charts in Excel
This paragraph introduces the goal of replicating visually appealing charts from The Economist in Excel. It highlights the specific bar chart that will be recreated, emphasizing its unique design features such as the titles on top and the varied numerical scales. The paragraph then transitions into a practical example, showing how to create a similar chart in a corporate context by using a 100% stacked bar chart and adjusting its formatting to match the style of The Economist's chart.
📈 Creating a Dumbbell Chart for Employee Engagement Scores
The second paragraph focuses on creating a dumbbell chart, also known as a connected dot plot, which is useful for showing changes or comparisons between two periods. The example given involves plotting employee engagement scores for different departments over two years. The process involves using a scatter plot, translating non-numeric category labels into numbers, and adding connecting lines as error bars to visualize the change. The paragraph also discusses adjusting the chart's aesthetics and adding labels for clarity.
🚀 Enhancing PowerPoint Presentations with Think-Cell
This paragraph discusses the challenges of creating and presenting charts in PowerPoint and introduces Think-Cell as a solution. Think-Cell is an add-in that integrates Excel spreadsheets with PowerPoint, allowing for auto-updating charts and easy management of slide elements. The sponsor's offer of a free 30-day trial is highlighted, encouraging viewers to improve their presentations with this tool. The paragraph then transitions back to the main topic by introducing the next visual to be replicated in Excel.
🎨 Crafting a Dynamic Visual for IT Help Desk Complaints
The final paragraph describes the process of creating a dynamic visual representation for the frequency of IT help desk complaints across departments and years. The approach involves using an Excel table to ensure the visual updates automatically with new data. The paragraph details the steps of creating shapes in PowerPoint, saving them as pictures, and inserting them into Excel cells. It then explains how to use the XLOOKUP function to associate the correct shape with each complaint frequency and how to construct the final visual with a title and legend. The paragraph concludes by demonstrating the dynamic nature of the visual, which updates automatically when new data is added.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Excel Charts
💡The Economist
💡Stacked Bar Chart
💡Dumbbell Chart
💡Color-Coded Frequency Table
💡Think-Cell
💡Dynamic Data Visualization
💡Data Labels
💡Conditional Formatting
💡XLOOKUP Function
💡Transposing Data
Highlights
The video tutorial focuses on replicating three distinct chart styles from The Economist in Excel, aiming to create visually appealing and dynamic data visualizations.
The first chart is a bar chart comparing the number of ships, aircraft, and helicopters between China and the United States, with a unique design feature where category titles are placed on top instead of the side.
The tutorial demonstrates how to create a dynamic chart in Excel by inserting a 100% stacked bar chart and adjusting its format to match the design of The Economist's chart.
The second chart, referred to as a dumbbell chart or connected dot plot, is used to emphasize change or compare values between two different periods, with an example of men's life expectancy at the average age of retirement.
The tutorial explains how to create a scatter plot in Excel to represent data for the dumbbell chart, including translating non-numeric category labels into numeric positions for the x and y axes.
The third visual is a color-coded table that is not a traditional heat map, but rather a representation of estimated frequencies of high temperatures exceeding 50 centigrade across different countries.
The tutorial provides a corporate context application of the color-coded table, visualizing the estimated frequency of complaints directed at an IT help desk across different departments and years.
The video introduces a method for creating a dynamic visual in Excel using an official Excel table, which allows for automatic updates when new data is added.
Think-Cell is highlighted as a valuable tool for creating auto-updating charts in PowerPoint, potentially reducing the time spent on slide creation by up to 70%.
The tutorial emphasizes the importance of dynamic data visualizations that can automatically update to reflect changes in data, improving efficiency and presentation quality.
The presenter shares a link to a template for replicating The Economist-style charts in Excel and mentions an upcoming Business Charts course for creating McKinsey-style charts.
The video provides detailed step-by-step instructions for formatting, inserting, and adjusting charts in Excel to achieve a professional and polished look.
The use of XLOOKUP function is showcased for dynamic data lookup and display in Excel, enhancing the functionality and interactivity of the created visuals.
The tutorial also covers how to manage and format chart elements, such as titles, data labels, and legends, to ensure clarity and effectiveness in data communication.
The presenter's approach to creating visuals involves adapting and applying design principles from high-profile publications like The Economist to corporate contexts, demonstrating practical applications of data visualization.
Transcripts
So, did you ever want to create charts in Excel that look like they're from The Economist? That's
something I've been hearing a lot when I chat to people about creating Excel charts. So,
that's what we're going to do today. We're going to be replicating these three charts
from The Economist in Excel, and we're going to set everything up in a dynamic way. Now,
before we get started, a quick thanks goes to Think-Cell for sponsoring today's video,
but more on them later. Let's get started with this chart first.
Here we have a bar chart that compares the number of ships, aircraft, and helicopters between China
and the United States. Notice something is different between this and a normal bar chart?
The titles for each category are on top and not on the side. This is a nice design choice. For one,
it's easier to connect each category with its own bar. It also takes up less space,
right? You can make it more compact. But most importantly, take a look at the numbers. They
vary a lot. Some are in hundreds and some are just a few. By putting the depths on top,
we kind of break up this chart so it looks like we're dealing with multiple charts,
and it helps avoid confusion. So, let's see how we could apply this to corporate context.
So here we have the same numbers, just the context is different. Let's assume we're a manufacturing
company that's sourcing parts from China and the United States. We want to create a similar chart.
Let me just push this to the side. First thing I'm going to do is highlight the area, go to Insert,
and insert a stacked bar chart, the 100% stacked bar. Okay, so first thing I noticed is that this
is the other way round. I want "Battery Cells" to be on top. So, select the axis, right-mouse click,
Format Axis, and select "Categories in reverse order". This is going to switch things up. Let's
remove what we don't need. I'm going to delete the numbers there, I'm going to delete the grid lines.
Let's bring up the legend and place it right here. Okay, so let's adjust the colors. This one for
China, this was a red color, so let's go to Fill Options. I'm going to go with this one. For US,
this was a gray color, let's go with this one. Now, let's add data labels to these. So select
one of these series, right-mouse click, Add Data Labels. Do the same for the other one. We
want these labels to be right aligned. So let's select the labels and go to Label Options. For
label position, select "Inside End". We're going to put these in bold. I'm going to do Ctrl + B.
For these, instead of "Inside End", we want them "Inside Base". Ctrl + B for bold. And let's go
and make them white. So far so good. Now let's add in our titles there. First thing I'm going to do
is to remove the current axis. I'm just going to press Delete. Now, let's go ahead and add in our
titles. This is an important step. Okay, select a chart first and then go to Insert and insert
a text box, and then draw it out where you want it. I'm going to position it here. Now don't go
inside the text box, click on the text box to activate it, go directly to the formula bar,
type in an equals, and then reference the cell that has the title and press Enter. Okay,
so why did I tell you to select a chart first before you go and insert the text box? Well,
that's because when you do that, the text box is a part of your chart, so you don't have to
group it together, you can move this chart and the text box comes with it. Now we're going to
replicate this. So just select a text box, hold down Ctrl, and drag. And let's just repeat,
hold down Ctrl, drag, and let's do that two more times. Okay, so now that we have this,
we just have to correct the cell referencing. So for this one, we're going to reference cell A6,
this one is going to be A7, let's expand this, this one A8, right? It's fun working with Excel,
this one is A9. Okay, that's it. All we need is the title. I'm just going to connect it to
this right here and our chart is done. Now, because we've connected the titles
to the cells, if they happen to change, they're automatically reflected in the chart as well.
Next chart is this one. It's typically referred to as a dumbbell chart or a connected dot plot, and
it's great for cases when you want to emphasize change or compare values between two different
periods. Here we have men's life expectancy at the average age of retirement in the 1970s as compared
to 2020. Now something we have to keep in mind if we're planting this in Excel is that change can
also go the other way, right? So we could be worse off now than we were before like we have here. So
something we have to keep in mind, whatever technique we use should work in this case as
well. So let's say you work in the HR department and you've collected employee engagement scores
for these different departments. Optimally your score has improved this year as compared to the
previous year, but unfortunately things could go the other way as well. We want to use a dumbbell
chart to plot this. To make sure we can handle all types of situations, I'm going to use a scatter
plot. A scatter plot needs numbers for both the x-axis as well as the y-axis. Now in the y-axis,
I have my category labels. These are not numbers, so I am going to translate them into numbers,
basically, I'm just going to get their position as numbers. Just holding down Ctrl, dragging
this down, and I have my indexes here. Now, let's just go somewhere empty, don't be on this data set
because Excel is going to come up with a crazy chart, just go somewhere empty, go to Insert,
and insert a scatter plot. Now, we have an empty canvas, right-mouse click on it, select Data,
Add, Series Name. First one I'm going to add is the 2023 engagement scores, select the title. X
values, these are my percentages, Y values, well optimally they would be my departments,
but because a scatter plot needs numbers, I'm going to go with their position. And okay,
let's add our second series, that's the 2024 series, X values are my percentages and Y values
are my positions, and OK, OK. Next let's add our connecting lines. Well, that is the difference
between my before and after. So let's calculate that here. This is simply this minus this one,
and let's send this down. Okay, so how do we add these in here? Well, I'm not going to add it as a
separate series, instead, I'm going to select my after series here and activate the error bars for
it. So go to the plus here and place a check mark for Error Bars. I'll delete the vertical ones,
so select them, press Delete. Now, select the horizontal ones, right-mouse click and format
them. For the direction, I want them to go the other way, so we're going to go with minus. I
don't want a cap, that's that little line here, we don't need that. For the Error Amount, we're going
to go with Custom and specify the value ourselves. And you've probably guessed what that value is.
For the negative error bars, we are going to use our difference, and OK, and we get our dots
connected with one another. Now, let's take care of our labels here. So this is where we obviously
don't want to see these numbers, right? We want to see these. So what I'm going to do is add a series
that plots a dot at every point along this axis. That series has a value of zero for the x-axis,
right? So I'm just going to put zeros everywhere here. This is going to be for my labels. So we're
going to add a new series, Select Data, Add, Series Name: labels. The X values, we're going
to plot everything right here along this line, our Y values are our Y position. Okay, this is
exactly where we want to have these labels. Click on OK and OK, select them, right-mouse click and
Add Data Labels. Select the data labels, go and format them, place them on the left-hand side. For
Label Options, we're going to go with "Value From Cells." What we want to see here are these values,
and OK, and uncheck the Y value here. Now it looks a bit crowded, so let me just select my
vertical axis, the original one that we had, and press Delete to remove it. Okay, so that's how we
can get our labels in there. Now, we don't really need these, we could change the marker style if we
want, but I just want to hide them. So right-mouse click and let's get rid of the fill, and in case
they have an outline, let's get rid of the outline as well. Okay, so this is our connected dot plot.
We can improve on it by making these lines a lot lighter, and we could make these thicker
as well. To do that, select them, right-mouse click, Format Data Series, go to Fill Options.
Under Marker for Marker Options, Built-in, you can make them bigger if you need to. For Fill,
we can adjust the color, so I'm going to go with solid fill and go with a light orange, and we can
have the dark orange for the after. Okay, let's just quickly adjust the size of these as well.
Format them, under Fill Options for Built-in, I'm just going to increase to the same size. And here
we have our before and after. You also have the opportunity to change the formatting of the error
lines, so we don't have to go with the default, we can go and make it into a nice gray color and make
it thicker, so it looks like a bar, right? All we need to do now is add a proper title to our
chart. Let's bring down the plot area and type in the title. Now, to make it clear what is what, I'm
going to format "2023" to be the same color as my 2023 dots here, so let's make it bold, and "2024"
should be in this darker orange and make it bold. Okay, so that's our neat dumbbell chart in Excel.
Now, it's one thing to create your charts in Excel, but it's a whole different story when
you need to create charts or present charts in PowerPoint for your business reports because
it can be a real challenge to make them look just right. So if you're one of those people
who spends over 3 hours per week in PowerPoint, then Think-Cell might be just what you need,
because this add-in can help you reduce the time that you spend on your slides by up to 70%. And
Think-Cell is also well known in the business world. In fact, 90% of Fortune 500 companies
trust Think-Cell with their presentations. With Think-Cell, it's easy to build auto-updating
charts in PowerPoint. You get to link your Excel spreadsheets straight to PowerPoint and then
choose which slides you want to update manually or automatically. You can manage all slide
elements from one convenient menu, which makes it super easy to review and, most importantly,
to deliver mistake-free presentations. Now another benefit you get is that you can directly improve
on your charts in PowerPoint by just clicking or dragging and dropping changes. This way,
you get to add in more information to your chart so you make it easy for your audience
to understand the data that you're presenting. If you were doing this manually, it would take up a
big chunk of your time. With Think-Cell, it's just a matter of clicking here and there. And
here's the best part: because Think-Cell is sponsoring this video, you get to try
their add-in completely free for 30 days. Just click on the link in the description and start
taking your presentations from good to great risk-free. Now let's continue with our video.
The next visual is this one right here. It's not technically a chart. Now at first glance,
I thought it's a heat map, but it's not a heat map either. It's just color-coded based on these
different categories. So what we have here is the estimated frequency of temperatures exceeding 50
centigrade. "Almost never" is really dark gray, then "Extremely rare," "Rare," and
"Common," and we have these different countries. So I tried to apply this to corporate context,
and here's an idea I came up with. We have the same data, just the context is different. We're
looking at the estimated frequency of complaints directed at IT help desk between these different
departments and these different years. Now I'm not happy with this approach. One, it's
not dynamic. If you take a look at what's inside the cells, if you take a look at the formula bar,
you can see our values are right here. Then I've used conditional formatting to conditionally
format each of these based on the cell's value. I've also activated white borders for this, but
it's not as compact and neat as the version that we saw from The Economist. So I really wanted to
replicate that, and that's what we're going to do on this side here. And we're going to use a method
that became recently available in Excel. Plus, take a look at this. Your data is probably going
to come in in this format, right? Where you're going to have separate columns for department,
year, and complaints. So I formatted this data as an official Excel table so that we can get
our visual to be fully dynamic. If new data is added, that Economist type of visual is going
to update automatically. These are my different categories. For each of these, I want to have a
separate color and shape. Now it's up to you where you want to create these. I've created
these shapes in PowerPoint just because I like PowerPoint. I'm going to go to Insert,
Shape and draw this out. So a shape that looks similar to this one. And then you can adjust the
shape fill. I'll use the eyedropper and select this. Shape outline is going to be white. Once
you have the shape, you can right mouse click and save it as a picture. So I've already done
that for these four different categories. Next, I'm going to go to Excel, select these cells,
go to Insert, Illustrations, Pictures, Place in Cell, This Device, these are my different shapes.
Hold down Ctrl, select all of them, and click on Insert. Okay, so now that I have them here,
I'm going to bring them and include them as a part of my table. So that if a frequency is rare,
I want to see the picture. Okay, so let's call this "Category." You can
use the lookup function of your choice. Mine is XLOOKUP. I'm looking up this value from
this range. Let's fix the referencing using F4. And what we want to return,
so the return array is going to be this range. I'm going to fix it using F4. Close the bracket,
press Enter. And because I'm using a table, my formula automatically is copied down. Right?
So now I have the right shape associated with each complaint frequency. Okay, so next, let's go ahead
and create our visual. I'll start right here. First, I want to have the departments. So I'm
going to use the UNIQUE function and let's just reference the Department column, close bracket,
Enter. Up here, I want to have the unique list of the years. So again, we're going to use the
UNIQUE function and reference the Year column. And when I press Enter, the years spill into the rows,
but I want them in the columns. So I'm going to put this inside the TRANSPOSE function. Next up,
we're going to bring in the shapes. So again, go with the lookup function of your choice.
I'll go with XLOOKUP. My lookup value is now the combination of Department and Year. So I'm going
to select Department, but because I'm working with spilled ranges, I can select the entire range. Use
an ampersand to connect it with the Year column, right? So notice I get the hash icon here,
which means I'm referencing a spilled range. My lookup array is the combination of Department and
Year. Right? I have to follow the same order. So let's select Department, ampersand, Year. What do
I want returned? The Category. Close the bracket. And the beauty of this is it's going to spill down
and across, right? That's my visual right there. All that's missing is a title. So let's bring it
over here. I can add in the legend by copying these, pasting them here, and then notice this
icon. I get to pluck these images out of the cells. So I'm going to select them, let's go
to more size options, you can uncheck "Lock aspect ratio," and then I'll just go with 0.1. Okay, so
then you can place them wherever you need to and add in the right category name. So I'll just fast
forward to where I've done this, and this here is our beautiful visual. Now the beauty of this is
also the fact that it's dynamic. So let's say we have next year's data that's added to the table,
I'm just going to paste it in. Notice the formulas are automatically copied down here.
Unfortunately, IT is also not having with the IT Help Desk, but what happens to my visual? It's
automatically updated. How cool is that? That's it, three charts from The Economist replicated
in Excel. If you want to get the template, link to it is below. I'm also working on a
new Business Charts course where we're going to be creating charts that look like McKinsey charts
in Excel. Many thanks goes to Think-Cell for sponsoring this video. Thank you for being here,
thank you for watching all the way to the end, and I'm going to catch you in the next video.
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