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.

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.

Changing Time Zones in Power Query

When you get date and time values from another systems, sometimes it is in a time zone that is different from yours. For example you might get a field that has a date/time/timzone in UTC or GMT format, but you need to doanalysiss in Western time. How do you convert the timezone? You could actually do the calculations and offset it by adding or subtracting hours to the UTC value. Switching time zones gets more complicated if you have to deal with daylight saving time. You'd have to find out which zonehour had daylight saving applied and which did not. How you handled the time zones begins by setting or configuring an initial time zone in Power Query for the date/time value.