Skip to main content

The Pac-Man Dashboard

Over this weekend, in a random conversation, A friend asked if I can build a dashboard entirely of pie charts. Now that is a serious challenge! Pie-charts do not rank among my favorites, and to build a dashboard entirely of them is definitely not a fantasy of mine.

I looked into my collection of excel spreadsheets for a data table. I found one, but unfortunately do not remember where I've downloaded it from. It contains month-wise performance of 4 sales representatives, for 3 products, across 3 customer types, 4 regions and over 2 years.

After adding couple of columns to the original data and creating some much needed tables, and I was ready to set up my pies; - Oops, pie-charts. In about two hours, my dashboard is done. Can't help but feel all the pie charts give it a "Pac Man" look.

The top section of my "Pac Man" dashboard,



And the lower section of it.


Overall, it has been some time well spent and some valuable lessons learnt. This far and no further with pie charts!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Playfair Charts: Scotland ExIm Barchart

Soon after finishing the second Playfair chart, the one on Wheat Price and Wages, I searched the internet for additional charts made by him. I found a Bar chart circa 1786, which showed the Scottish export and import volumes with other countries. For me, the real thrill was to scroll by the list of the name of places long consigned to history books - Jersey Is, Greenland, Prussia, Denmark and Norway (together) and Flanders.  First, the original Playfair Barchart from Wikipedia,  Then, my version of it in Excel.  A couple of parting words:  Excel 2007 no longer support dots and lines as fillers for charts. Hence, the ribbed import chart is given a different color, Gold.  Normally, I'd use data point labels to construct the chart legends and other declarations given at the bottom of the chart. However, given Excel 2007' inability to automatically re-size labels to fit texts, I was forced to use text-boxes instead. 

Florence Nightingale Circumplex Chart

I was taken to the  Florence Nightingale's Wiki page   during a recent research, and one of the interesting things I noted was her contribution to statistics. It came to me as a pleasant surprise that she is credited with inventing the polar area diagram , or occasionally the Nightingale rose diagram, which is equivalent to a modern circular histogram. Following the completion of my project and in my weekend to spare, I devoted time to recreating the chart in Excel. It took a combination of Doughnut-Pie-and XY charts and close to four hours to finish it. The colours are a bit darker, the values are approximate and the labels differently oriented, yet the chart looks fairly close to the original as is shown by the picture below.

The Dorling Cartogram

My last project involved using a multitude of regions for drawing analysis, parallels and comparison. Not wanting to use yet another Choropleth graph, I decided to look up alternatives that were easier to create and preferably required no VBA. Soon I stumbled upon "The Dorling Cartogram", defined in the UCSB site as, "This type of cartogram was named after its inventor, Danny Dorling of the University of Leeds. A Dorling cartogram maintains neither shape, topology nor object centroids, though it has proven to be a very effective cartogram method. To create a Dorling cartogram, instead of enlarging or shrinking the objects themselves, the cartographer will replace the objects with a uniform shape, usually a circle, of the appropriate size." I had the data for Obesity in the United States handy, so I decided to give it a try before using it in my project. I opted to use Bubble charts because data points within a series may need to be of varied shapes based on...