I’ve emphasized before that the key behind Visual Design is that every formatting decision you make should have a purpose behind it. In the following post, I plan to demonstrate more of the visual style I use in Excel. These formatting techniques still do have justifications behind them, but there are no hard and fast ...
Visual Design is a concept that many people don’t think about when using Excel. However, given how much Excel’s visual display capabilities have improved over the years, the concept is becoming more and more important. There are a number of great books on Visual Design and they all have very similar themes. The following post is ...
Pasting chart formats is an Excel function that’s somewhat un-intuitive to find and therefore underutilized. One of the main reasons that people don’t bother improving the formatting of their charts is because of the time it takes to make these adjustments. By using the paste format function for your charts, you can save yourself time ...
Because it’s buried deep in the cell formatting menu and has very little documentation, Excel’s custom number formatting is probably its most underutilized feature. Understanding and mastering this feature can greatly enhance the Visual Design of your Excel workbooks. The key benefit of custom number formatting is: It allows you to change the appearance of your ...
One of the most important skills in Visual Design is being able to improve the formatting of your Excel charts. Even if your displaying the exact same data set, the formatting of a chart can make a huge difference in terms of effectively communicating your data. For any given chart, there is always some level of ...
For stacked bar charts, Excel 2010 allows you to add data labels only to the individual components of the stacked bar chart. The basic chart function does not allow you to add a total data label that accounts for the sum of the individual components. Fortunately, creating these labels manually is a fairly simply process. Step ...
The chart on the bottom is Excel’s default formatting while the chart on the top has been heavily updated. Looking at both charts together, most people would agree that the chart on the top looks better. The purpose of Visual Design is to explain why the first chart looks better and do so from a ...
The majority of people who are really good at Microsoft Excel will tell you that they gained their knowledge simply through experience. When I was a management consulting analyst, I’d frequently be given tasks that I thought were impossible with a spreadsheet; the process of coming up with an Excel solution was what really established ...