Presenting financial figures with Excel: Part 1 - an introduction
The theme of this ExcelZone tutorial series by Simon Hurst on Excel financial reports is, "Could do better."
So much effort goes into Excel: acquiring the data in the first place, working out and performing all the calculations, making sure everything is correct. It seems a shame if all this good work goes to waste because the end result - the presentation of the key information that a spreadsheet reveals - isn't as good as it could be.
Continued...
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Align Excel’s charts with the best practices of data visualizati
Hi,
We recently released a new Excel-Add-in Chart Tamer. Chart Tamer attempts to align Excel’s charts with the best practices of data visualization. It tames Excel’s charts, which seem to exhibit Microsoft’s belief that “more is better”, by bringing them into line with the data presentation philosophy that “simple is better.” We don’t need more choices—we need a few good choices that really work.
Chart Tamer improves the charts that we produce with Excel in the following ways:
• It limits the list of available charts to the few that are most useful, thereby reducing the complexity of choosing an appropriate chart
• It provides a simple new interface for selecting an appropriate chart, which guides us to the right selection when help is needed without bogging us down when it’s not
• It adds three useful charts that aren’t currently available in Excel: dot plots, strip plots, and box plots
• It revises the formatting defaults of Excel’s charts so that no extra work is necessary to create charts that work effectively
• It provides colors for use in charts and elsewhere that were designed to work especially for data presentation
• It allows us to quickly and easily improve old charts that were created prior to Chart Tamer
Andreas Lipphardt
BonaVista Systems
http://www.bonavistasystems.com/