Unit-3

Conditional formatting, charts that inspire (waterfall, column, line, combo, thermometer, scatter,
histogram, slicer, sparklines), graphics tricks and techniques

What is a Waterfall chart in Excel?

A waterfall chart is actually a special type of Excel column chart. It is normally used to
demonstrate how the starting position either increases or decreases through a series of
changes.

The first and the last columns in a typical waterfall chart represent total values. The
intermediate columns appear to float, and show positive or negative change from one period
to another, ending up in the final total value. As a rule, these columns are color-coded for
distinguishing positive and negative values. A bit further in this article you'll know a trick how
to make the intermediate columns float.

A waterfall chart is also known as an Excel bridge chart since the floating columns make a
so-called bridge connecting the endpoints.

Use of Waterfall Chart: These charts are quite useful for analytical purposes. If you need to
evaluate a company profit or product earnings, make an inventory or sales analysis or just
show how the number of your Facebook friends changed during that year, a waterfall chart
in Excel is just what you need.

For Example: Let's create a simple sample table with positive and negative values to
understand the things better. I'll take the sales amount as an example. If you look at the table
below, you'll see that the sales grow during some months, and they fall during others as
compared to the starting position.
Excel bridge chart will be a perfect way to visualize the sales flow over twelve months.

How to creating waterfall charts

As you can see, it is not difficult at all to manually create a waterfall chart in Excel 2016 -
2010.
Sparklines

What is a sparkline chart in Excel?

A sparkline is a tiny graph that resides in a single cell. The idea is to place a visual near the
original data without taking too much space, therefore sparklines are sometimes called "in-
line charts".

Use of Sparkline Chart: Sparklines can be used to visualizing fluctuations in temperature,

stock prices, periodic sales figures, and any other variations over time. You insert sparklines
next to the rows or columns of data and get a clear graphical presentation of a trend in each
individual row or column.

Sparklines were introduced in Excel 2010 and are available in all later versions of Excel 2013,
Excel 2016, Excel 2019, and Excel for Office 365.

For Example:

How to insert sparklines in Excel

To create a sparkline in Excel, perform these steps:

1. Select a blank cell where you want to add a sparkline, typically at the
end of a row of data.
2. On the Insert tab, in the Sparklines group, choose the desired
type: Line, Column or Win/Loss.
3. In the Create Sparklines dialog window, put the cursor in the Data
Range box and select the range of cells to be included in a sparkline
chart.
4. Click OK.
Sparkline types
Microsoft Excel provides three types of sparklines: Line, Column, and Win/Loss.

Line sparkline in Excel

These sparklines look very much like small simple lines. Similar to a
traditional Excel line chart, they can be drawn with or without markers. You are
free to change the line style as well as the color of the line and markers. We will
discuss how to do all this a bit later, and in the meanwhile just show you an
example of line sparklines with markers:
Column sparkline in Excel

These tiny charts appear in the form of vertical bars. As with a classic column
chart, positive data points are lying above the x-axis and negative data points
below the x-axis. Zero values are not displayed – an empty space is left at a zero
data point. You can set any color you want for positive and negative mini columns
as well as highlight the largest and smallest points.

Win/Loss sparkline in Excel

This type is very much like a column sparkline, except that it does not show the
magnitude of a data point – all bars are of the same size regardless of the original
value. Positive values (wins) are plotted above the x-axis and negative values
(losses) below the x-axis.

You can think of a win/loss sparkline as a binary micro-chart, which is best to be

used with values that can only have two states such as True/False or 1/-1. For
example, it works perfectly for displaying game results where 1's represent wins
and -1's defeats:

How to change sparklines in Excel

After you have created a micro graph in Excel, what is the next thing you would
usually want to do? Customize it to your liking! All customizations are done on
the Sparkline tab that appears as soon as you select any existing sparkline in a
sheet.
Change sparkline type

To quickly change the type of an existing sparkline, do the following:

1. Select one or more sparklines in your worksheet.

2. Switch to the Sparkline tab.

3. In the Type group, pick the one you want.

Show markers and highlight specific data points

To make the most important points in sparklines more noticeable, you can
highlight them in a different color. Additionally, you can add markers for each data
point. For this, simply select the desired options on the Sparkline tab, in
the Show group:

Here is a brief overview of the available options:

 1. High Point – highlights the maximum value in a sparkline.

2. Low Point – highlights the minimum value in a sparkline.

3. Negative Points - highlights all negative data points.

4. First Point – shades the first data point in a different color.

5. Last Point – changes the color of the last data point.

6. Markers – adds markers at each data point. This option is only available for line
sparklines.

Excel sparklines: tips and notes

As you already know, creating sparklines in Excel is easy and straightforward. The following
tips will help you use them professionally:

• Sparklines can only be used in Excel 2010 and later; in Excel 2007 and earlier, they
are not shown.
• Like full-blown charts, Excel sparklines are dynamic and automatically update when
the data changes.
• Sparklines only include numeric data; text and error values are ignored. If the source
data set has blank cells, a sparkline chart has blanks too.
• A sparkline size is dependent on the cell size. When you change the cell's height or
width, the sparkline adjusts accordingly.
• Unlike traditional Excel charts, sparklines are not objects, they are images in the
background of a cell.
• Having a sparkline in a cell does not prevent you from entering data or formulas in
that cell. You can even use sparklines together with conditional formatting icons to
enhance the visualization capability.
• You can create sparklines for Excel tables and pivot tables too.
• To copy your sparkline charts to another application such as Word or Power Point,
paste them as pictures (Paste > Picture).
• The sparkline feature is disabled when a workbook is opened in the compatibility
mode.

Combo Chart
What is a Combination chart in Excel?
A combination chart is a chart that combines two or more chart types in a single chart.
To create a combination chart, execute the following steps.

1. Select the range A1:C13.

2. On the Insert tab, in the Charts group, click the Combo symbol.

4. Click Create Custom Combo Chart.

The Insert Chart dialog box appears.

4. For the Rainy Days series, choose Clustered Column as the chart type.

5. For the Profit series, choose Line as the chart type.

6. Plot the Profit series on the secondary axis.

7. Click OK.

Result:
Thermometer Chart
This example teaches you how to create a thermometer chart in Excel. A thermometer
chart shows you how much of a goal has been achieved.

To create a thermometer chart, execute the following steps.

1. Select cell B16.

Note: adjacent cells should be empty.

2. On the Insert tab, in the Charts group, click the Column symbol.

3. Click Clustered Column.

Result:

Further customize the chart.

4. Remove the chart tile and the horizontal axis.

5. Right click the blue bar, click Format Data Series and change the Gap Width to 0%.
6. Change the width of the chart.

7. Right click the percentages on the chart, click Format Axis, fix the minimum bound to 0, the
maximum bound to 1 and set the Major tick mark type to Outside.
Result:
Slicer
What is Excel slicer?

Slicers in Excel are graphic filters for tables, pivot tables and pivot charts. Due to their visual
qualities, slicers fit especially well with dashboards and summary reports, but you can use them
anywhere to make filtering data faster and easier.

Slicers were introduced in Excel 2010 and are available in Excel 2013, Excel 2016, Excel 2019
and later versions.

Here's how you can filter the pivot table data by selecting one or more buttons in the slicer box:
Excel slicers vs. PivotTable filters

Basically, slicers and pivot table filters do the same thing - show some data and hide other.
And each method has its strengths and weaknesses:

• Pivot table filters a bit clumsy. With slicers, filtering a pivot table is as simple as
clicking a button.
• Filters are tied to one pivot table, slicers can be connected to multiple pivot tables and
pivot charts.
• Filters are locked to columns and rows. Slicers are floating objects and can be moved
anywhere. For example, you can put a slicer next to your pivot chart or even within the
chart area and have the chart contents updated in real time on a button click.
• Pivot table filters may not work very well on touch screens. Slicers perform great in
many touch screen environments, except Excel mobile (including Android and iOS)
where this feature is not fully supported.
• Pivot table report filters are compact, slicers take up more worksheet space.
• Pivot table filters can be easily automated with VBA. Automating slicers requires a bit
more skills and efforts.

How to insert slicer in Excel

To get started with slicers, please follow the below guidelines that show how to add a slicer
for your Excel table, PivotTable, or PivotChart.

How to add slicer for pivot table in Excel

Creating a pivot table slicer in Excel is a matter of seconds. Here's what you do:

1. Click anywhere in the pivot table.

2. In Excel 2013, Excel 2016 and Excel 2019, go to the Analyze tab > Filter group,
and click the Insert Slicer In Excel 2010, switch to the Options tab, and
click Insert Slicer.
3. The Insert Slicers dialog box will pop up and show the checkboxes for each of
your pivot table fields. Select one or more fields for which you want to create a
slicer.
4. Click OK.

As an example, let's add two slicers to filter our pivot table by Product and Reseller:
Two pivot table slicers are created immediately:

How to create a slicer for Excel table

In addition to pivot tables, the modern versions of Excel also let you insert a slicer for a
regular Excel table. Here's how:

1. Click anywhere in your table.

2. On the Insert tab, in the Filters group, click Slicer.
 3. In the Insert Slicers dialog box, tick off the check boxes for one or more columns
that you want to filter.
4. Click OK.

That's it! A slicer is created and you can now filter your table data visually:

How to insert a slicer for pivot chart

To be able to filter a pivot chart with a slicer, you can actually make a slicer for your pivot
table like explained above, and it will control both the pivot table and the pivot chart.
To integrate a slicer with your pivot chart more closely like shown in the screenshot above,
carry out these steps:

1. Click anywhere in your pivot chart.

2. On the Analyze tab, in the Filter group, click Insert Slicer.
3. Select the checkboxes for the slicer(s) you want to create, and click OK.

This will insert the already familiar slicer box in your worksheet:

Once you have a slicer, you can use it to filter the pivot chart data straight away. Or, you may
want to make a few improvements, for example, hide the filter buttons on the chart, which
have become redundant since you are going to use the slicer for filtering.

Optionally, you can place the slicer box within the chart area. For this, make the chart area
bigger and the plot arear smaller (simply by dragging the borders), and then drag the slicer
box to the empty space:
If the slicer box gets hidden behind the chart, right-click the slicer, and select Bring to
Front from the context menu.

How to use slicer in Excel

Excel slicers were designed as user-friendly filter buttons, so their use is simple and intuitive.
The below sections will give you some hints on how to get started.

Slicer as a visual pivot table filter

Once a pivot table slicer is created, simply click on one of the buttons inside the slicer box to
filter your data. The pivot table will update immediately to show only the data that matches
your filter settings.

To remove a specific item from the filter, click the corresponding button in the slicer to
unselect the item.
You can also use a slicer to filter data that are not shown in the pivot table. For example, we
can insert the Product slicer, then hide the Product field, and the slicer will still filter our pivot
table by product:

If multiple slicers are connected to the same pivot table and clicking a certain item inside one
slicer makes some items in the other slicer greyed out, that means there is no data to display.

For example, after we select "John" in the Reseller slicer, "Cherries" in the Product slicer gets
greyed out, indicating that John did not make a single "Cherries" sale:
How to select multiple items in a slicer

There are 3 ways to select multiple items in an Excel slicer:

• Click the slicer buttons while holding the Ctrl key.

• Click the Multi-Select button (please see the screenshot below), and then click on the
items one by one.
• Click anywhere inside the slicer box, and press Alt + S to toggle on the Multi-
Select button. Select the items, and then press Alt + S again to toggle multi-selection
off.

Move a slicer in Excel

To move a slicer to another position in a worksheet, put the mouse pointer over
the slicer until the cursor changes to a four-headed arrow, and drag it to a new
position.