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DownloadNeed premade "Excel charts and graphs" for hard-to-visualize situations? We've created another Ultimate Charts (Part 4) spreadsheet template in Excel and Google Sheets that you can download and customize to your needs. It includes fully customizable sunburst charts, heat maps, bullet charts to visualize top KPIs, thermometer charts, three and four-circle Venn diagrams, filterable bell curves, milestone charts, and combo charts.
Questions and answers
The best part is, this spreadsheet is fully customizable - meaning any field in blue can be edited to fit any use case, whether you're in marketing, human resources, product development, or anything else. We'll now show how to use the spreadsheet template to easily plug existing data into these premade, difficult-to-create charts.
Questions and answers
Sunburst charts are difficult to create but useful to visualize the relationship between hierarchies. Here are two sunburst charts: a single sunburst, which shows a team hierarchy across divisions, teams, roles, and team members, as well as dual sunbursts. In this example, we compare actual sales versus target sales, and how the profits and losses break out between months, weeks, and regions.
Questions and answers
All these inputs in blue can be customized to match your data. This could be used by a supply chain management company to track parts by their respective groupings, an HR firm to track salaries or a sales company to account for deal sources. Just follow the path notations. Path 1 represents the innermost circle, Path 2 is the next layer, Path 3 is the third layer, and path 4 is the final layer. Also note: the sunburst charts become organizational charts on Google Sheets since Sheets does not support sunburst. But there may be instances where an org chart is preferred anyway. It functions the same way, except the tooltip column appears only when the mouse hovers over the respective entry.
This template also includes heat maps. The brand heat map example compares multiple brands and their regional sales data. The lighter colors represent the highest values, while the darker colors represent the lowest value. The entire table of data is then compared to find the lowest and highest values of all entries.
The temperature heat map is a more traditional heat map, where a series of numerics and dates are plotted out in different colors. This numeric column could be anything; sales data, part sizes, salary information, etc.
Bullet charts can be used to analyze and compare a series of KPIs across their target value, actual value, minimum, maximum, and average. Enter the metric name, its unit, the actual performance, the target performance, the minimum threshold, the maximum threshold, and the average threshold, and the charts go to work. Compare the actual bar in the center against the perpendicular target line to see how far over, or under, the actual is from its target. To utilize these hard-to-create charts for your KPIs, you can download and customize this template with your own data right now.
Questions and answers
The thermometer charts in this spreadsheet template function similarly to the bullet charts, where actual revenue and target revenue can be compared to find the percent completed, and how much the actual revenue is over or under by, with customizable thresholds to highlight bad, to average, to target performance.
Instead of sales numbers and reps, these headings could be changed to visualize anything, like a project's risk levels from "intolerable" to "acceptable", or a company's "actual" monthly expenses against its "budgeted" monthly expenses for multiple months. By the way: the Thermometer charts look better on Excel over Google Sheets, so if you plan to share these charts with external stakeholders... just saying!
Questions and answers
Venn diagrams help track interrelated nouns or numerics and where they overlap with one another. In this example, the three-circle Venn diagram counts team resources that overlap across multiple departments, while the four-circle Venn diagram counts the number of customers that use each product offering.
To change how each noun or numeric is counted below, change the reference type from "yes" or "no" to "1" or "0", "x" or "y", "y" or "n", or whatever your preference, and the formulas recognize those parameters in the table below.
For example, mark all "yes" entries with "X" and "no" entries with "Y", and the diagram will update accordingly. For more flexible and designful Venn Diagrams to share with external stakeholders, you can also check out our Venn Diagrams template, which is available in Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, and Google Slides.
There are a series of edge cases where you might need additional charts and graphs in Excel or Google Sheets that are difficult to build from scratch. The following charts are not common in other templates but are often the best way to highlight your data, like in situations where you want to showcase data on a curve, show progress on a timeline, or compare competing metrics across three dimensions. They are:
Bell curves: this template includes both one that finds an overall score across 9 unique categories, and one with a filter to highlight a specific value on the curve across any of ten total categories.
Milestone charts: a timeline tracks activities and those responsible across time. It could be customized to track days of the week, projects and tasks, or tasks and dependent sub-tasks.
Combo charts: these charts track two metrics against each other as a bar chart, with a third metric layered across as a line chart. In this example, revenue is compared against expenses to visualize the change in profit margin across time.
To easily visualize your datasets with hard-to-create charts and graphs, you can download and customize this Ultimate Charts (Part 4) template in Microsoft Excel or Google sheets right now. For more, go check out our Ultimate Charts (Part 3) template for premade Marimekko charts, Bubble charts, and Pareto analysis charts. And for more common chart types, you can check out our previous Ultimate Charts (Part 1) and Ultimate Charts (Part 2) spreadsheet templates. They include abstract and fully customizable pie charts, bar charts, treemaps, and everything in between.
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