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Scenario Comparisons With Variance Charts

Catherine France/ 1st March 20211st March 2021/ Charting & Visualisation, IBCS

Business data is often better understood when viewed in the context of another scenario. We need to know if we are doing better than this time last year, or how close we are to meeting our budget. Variance charts are effective at displaying these differences between actual and comparative values. They can show absolute or relative variances and be coloured to indicate either a good or bad impact on the business.

Faster Excel Queries For Power BI & Azure Analysis Services

Gary Crawford/ 9th February 20219th February 2021/ Data

If you have slow queries when reporting table format data in Excel from PowerBI.com, Azure Analysis Services or Tabular SSAS, this could be just the performance boost you need.

Waterfall Charts for Profit and Loss Statements

Catherine France/ 2nd February 20213rd February 2021/ Charting & Visualisation, IBCS

Income statements, or Profit and Loss statements, are an essential part of any business. However, when displayed as a large table of numbers, it can be difficult to draw out the information needed to answer simple questions such as “how has my revenue changed compared to last year?” or “which region has the largest contribution to labour expenses?”.

Waterfall charts are a great solution for this. In our last blog, we discussed how to use waterfalls for time analysis. Today, we will demonstrate how to use waterfalls for profit and loss statements, with intuitive scenario and account formatting.

Waterfall Charts in Excel – Time Analysis

Catherine France/ 8th January 20218th January 2021/ Charting & Visualisation, IBCS

Waterfall charts are a great way of visualising contributions to a total or a total variance. They allow you to analyse how a value is influenced by the cumulative effect of underlying positive or negative inputs. This can lead to quicker and more effective business insights.

Waterfalls are available as a chart type with XLCubed, in either a column or bar orientation. They connect directly to your data source, are fully interactive, and are easily inserted into an Excel sheet.

Lessons from IBCS – Scenario Handling

Gary Crawford/ 5th October 20205th October 2020/ Charting & Visualisation, IBCS, Reporting & Analytics

In the previous blog, we looked at how consistency is important throughout a set of reports and dashboards. It helps users to understand the reports quickly and easily. Another important aspect to maintain is scenario handling; this forms the UNIFY part of IBCS’ SUCCESS formula.

Lessons from IBCS – Maintaining Visual Integrity

Ambika Aggarwal/ 14th August 202014th August 2020/ Charting & Visualisation, IBCS

When reading reports and dashboards, we often find ourselves spending more time than we’d expect analysing the charts and tables tying to comprehend the data. In many cases that’s due to inconsistencies in the presentation, or poor design. Ideally a report should convey the message clearly and quickly.

One of the underlying rules of IBCS is maintaining visual integrity; this forms the ‘Check’ component of IBCS’s ‘SUCCESS’ formula. It requires reports and dashboards to present information in the most truthful and easily understood way. This involves avoiding misleading visuals including improper scaling and manipulated representations. When interpreting data, information that looks the same should also mean the same. Consistency is important and helps users to understand the report quickly and easily.

Lessons from IBCS – Eliminating Chart Clutter

Gary Crawford/ 6th August 20206th August 2020/ Charting & Visualisation, IBCS

The core job of a chart is to convey information to the viewer as clearly, concisely, and quickly as possible. One thing that can detract from this is chart clutter – distracting or unnecessary additional elements which can mask the overall message.

Lessons From IBCS – Choosing The Right Chart Type

Catherine France/ 16th July 202016th July 2020/ Charting & Visualisation, IBCS

Choosing the right chart type to display your data is key to communicating an understandable message to users. Bad or inconsistent use of chart types can lead to confusion and poor interpretations of the data. For a report to be effective, each visualisation must be carefully and deliberately chosen.

In this post, we will outline some of the guidance on chart orientation and type given by IBCS.

XLCubed and IBCS

Gary Crawford/ 7th July 20207th July 2020/ Charting & Visualisation, Grid & Report Formatting, IBCS, Reporting & Analytics

In the last few months we have significantly extended the charting elements within XLCubed. We wanted to get the product formally certified by IBCS, and I’m delighted to say we achieved that in early June. We’ve been aware of IBCS for several years now through some of our customers and partners, but it was really only at the beginning of this year that we started to look in detail, and it really resonated with us.

Updating SQL Tables from Excel

Ambika Aggarwal/ 5th March 20205th March 2020/ Data, Reporting & Analytics

Most of our customers use XLCubed for reporting, analysis and data visualisation, but an increasing number use it for data updates, either within budgeting and forecasting solutions or in niche applications.

XL3RunSQL is a neat method for running SQL updates from Excel, and allows users to build input forms (which can ultimately be web-enabled) quickly and easily.

In this blog, we will walk through the steps to set this up.