Win-Loss chart

If you are engaged in budgeting and cost analysis it will be useful to know how to create a Win-Loss chart. This is a type of Bar Chart chart which, on the left side, holds negative values (most often the losses), and on the right side positive values (most often the gains). On the left side there can be also shown the costs, and on the right side the revenues. Let’s take a look at how this chart works!

Chart analytics

Right below the menu with visualization tools there is a set of three icons that allows us to enter one of the three menus that will be shown at the bottom of this panel. They are called Fields, Formats, and Analytics. First shows all the fields that affect appearance of a visual, second has options for its formatting and the third contains functionalities by which we can improve the chart: trend line, constant, minimum, maximum, average and forecast …

Power BI Desktop visuals

Purpose of PowerBI Desktop application is to create reports on a local machine and publish them in the cloud for users who can see them anytime, at any moment, by Internet browser on a PC or a mobile device. Managers need to get clear, simple and visually nice reports. It seems that PowerBI meets all given criteria. In a text that follows I will describe various ways to create reports in PowerBI Desktop.

Bing Maps

Most of us are using Google Maps, but a few years ago Microsoft also went into the race and created its own version of the maps named after its Bing search engine. From Excel 2016 exists an add-in with the same name that you can use to display charts on maps. It allows you to display data, in a form of charts, positioned on maps that can be customized to the desired report layout.

People graph

In the previous “recipe” you could read about add-ins that you can download from the Office Store. One of them is called People Graph, and starting from the 2016 version, it’s a standard part of Excel. People Graph is convenient for showing charts that describe the results of a survey in which a population is being tested. It is used in a very simple way, and it enables the creation of picturesque reports.