Winning Designs

A contest judged by a group from mrexcel.com and Microsoft focused on visualizing data in Excel with PowerPivot where the data came from the Azure cloud data service. The details are at http://www.mrexcel.com/Challenge2011/challenge_52011.html.

I won one of the 2 prizes based on my three contest submissions (http://www.mrexcel.com/Challenge2011/challenge_52011_win.html). This post summarizes the three entries. My plan is to discuss each in detail in separate follow up posts and hopefully include the associated Excel file so that others can explore each approach by themselves.

For a version in a page by itself (i.e., not in a scrollable iframe as below) visit http://www.tushar-mehta.com/publish_train/data_visualization/10%20Dashboards.shtml

Tushar Mehta

Posted in Uncategorized

2 thoughts on “Winning Designs

  1. Congrats on the win. Your entries look like winners, and very useful templates for other stats. I’ve been using conditional colours for cells in an an Excel app called LeaveTracker, where various types of leave are colour-coded on a calendar, but can see the value of conditional colours for shapes too.

  2. Thanks, Bill. I like to look at data in their natural context. This reveals patterns or other contextual information that may not be evident with a built-in Excel chart or even most common derivative charts.

    Examples other than a map include:
    1) a vertical area chart to visualize space debris by altitude,
    2) a layout of a manufacturing facility to visualize bottlenecks,
    3) a flow diagram of information (or paper) flows in an office to view excessive delays or unnecessary hand-offs, and, of course,
    4) a map to visualize a route and traffic conditions such as shown by Google Maps/Navigation.


Posting code? Use <pre> tags for VBA and <code> tags for inline.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.