We had an interesting scenario while helping a customer extend an existing Excel dashboard.
We had recently performed some work to solve some performance and design issues they had with their existing Analysis Services cubes. They now had more of their underlying data available and the ability to query longer periods without the performance hit (a year’s worth of data vs 28-days).
They wanted to make the most of this by charting changes in daily sales data over the previous 12 months, broken down by their four main business groups. Ideally the chart would become part of the existing Management Report, the difficulty was the lack of report real estate to add the extra information. This is something we have all come across previously and of course typically solved by using In-Cell charts.
Plotting the data on an Excel chart in the space available would give us this:
Converting to Sparklines gave us a slightly better view, but given the number of data items being plotted still not ideal.
Luckily our customer had recently upgraded to V6.1 of XLCubed so we were able to use one of our newest incell chart types: SparkHorizons. There is a good explanation of Horizon charts as part of the research paper: Sizing the Horizon: The Effects of Chart Size and Layering on the Graphical Perception of Time Series Visualizations and Stephen Few has covered them previously.
Essentially a line chart is split into colored bands – degrees of blue for positive numbers and degrees of red for negative numbers. In XLCubed this is 3 bands of each colour. The separation of the vertical scale means that horizon charts can be a lot more effective than standard sparklines where the scale of the numbers vary significantly, but you still want to retain a common scale view.
In this case plotting the same data as horizon charts makes things a lot clearer:
It now becomes quite clear when sales a trending up vs down. It’s also possible to flip the negative values so they appear on the same direction as the positive values:
We are always looking at ways of developing and extending XLCubed, SparkHorizons were added because they looked like they had the potential to be useful where the data suited them, so it was pleasing to be able to use them in a real-world situation.
It’s also worth mentioning that although, in this case the data came from Analysis Services Cubes, because they are available as Excel formula they can be used to plot any Excel data, here’s an example of the formula:
=XL3SparkHorizon(Sheet1!$V$2:$V$262,Sheet1!E10)
This will plot the data from Sheet1!$V$2:$V$262 as a SparkHorizon graph in Sheet1!E10.