Speedometer in Excel

Last week I was browsing through various graphics I used in my presentations and the speedometer struck me. Following is a sample speedometer graph created from excel:

As always, there are several blogs available for creating this manually. Also Excel 2013 has some apps which helps you create this easily. For reference:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/store/gauge-WA103524919.aspx

But for poor souls like me who are still stuck with Excel 2007 or 2010, creating this graph from scratch is a big pain. Also you would need good amount of excel skills to make the required changes.

I spent the last one hour trying to create a customizable template which can be used with various data ranges rather than being stuck with 0-100 and I would say I am pretty happy with the results. :)

I could not test it for multiple scenarios and all comments are welcome. You could format the graphs bit more to suit your aesthetic senses. I just love the color "black".

As always, the template can be downloaded from the following location:
Speedometer

Project Timeline Variance

Ever wondered how to show the project timeline variance in a sleek graph for your executive presentation!

I was stuck with this question and I did not know how to tackle it. After some brainstorming we came up with this idea of using the project critical milestones (you can use the delivery milestones) to show the time variance of the project. Normally each of the project would have the critical milestones through the entire life cycle of the project. Following is the timeline variance graph we created:

The result is a crisp graph which shows you how the project has deviated from the baseline over time. Wider the distance between the two, the more trouble you are in. You need to speed up your tasks or worst case rebaseline your project. :).

I initially thought of automating it, but then realized that it takes only a minute or two to create it and the time needed to work on a macro is not worth it.

If you find it useful, the template can be downloaded from the following location:
Project Timeline Variance

Cascaded Charts in Excel

Recently one of my friends asked me to help him in creating a cascaded chart in Excel which looked something like the following:

There are several sites which offer an add in to create this for $$ and there are many blogs which show how to create it manually. Creating it manually took some time and was a little cumbersome. Being an ex consultant who worked in creating presentations, I thought why not automate it using a macro (writing code/recording) . Any people will have to use it for multiple presentations multiple times. I thought I could take it to next step and automate the entire thing from creating the data required for the graph from the generic data using some config variables. The final result is something sort of a fully automated template which can generate this graph with the click of a button.

I tested it for multiple scenarios and works as expected. There would be some scenarios I missed and would be happy if someone communicates it to me. It will be also great if you have further enhancements and I can work to take it to the next level. 

The template file can be downloaded from the following location:

Cascaded Charts Template