Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Create a Frequency Polygon Chart to Compare Data



If you've tried to compare data on a frequency histogram that would be challenging because it would overlay each other. Even though you could make one color a bit more transparent, it still wouldn't show that well. An alternative to a frequency histogram is a frequency polygon. It's a bit more minimal because it's almost like a line chart...so you have an easier time showing more that one series of data to do some comparisons. Check out the video to learn how.

Thursday, June 4, 2020

Dynamic Combo Chart in Excel


A combination chart is a chart type that has more than one type of chart in a single view. Most times it's a combination of a column and line chart where it would plot something like volume and revenue together. The volume data can be a column chart and the revenue data can be the line chart. Excel has provided this combo chart capability for quite a while but in later version it became very easy as a chart type selection (which this video will cover). However there not really an option to give interaction like selecting to view the column chart alone and then both chart type together with a click of the button. This video will cover a quick hack on how to create a dynamic or interactive combo chart using slicers.

Tuesday, June 2, 2020

Power BI Animated Bar Chart


An animated chart in Power BI is nothing new since you could create an animated bubble chart. But the animation of a bar chart has been something that has been circulated around the Internet in some form or another outside of Microsoft products. You can experience it from Hans Rosling's Gapminder application to the Charticulator tool. This example will use covid-19 data from the New York Times dataset that can be found at github. Though not as entertaining as Trevor Noah's skit on using Excel to Flatten the curve (just search for "Microsoft Excel: Coronavirus Edition"), this hopefully is another edu-taining way to see data.