Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Leveraging Micro Charts to build a very quick visual summary of your key metrics.
Quick reference
Micro Charting
Building fully functional micro charts in Excel.
When to use
Use to create tiny charts focused on specific data trends. This technique allows building many charts on one page that can be consumed very quickly.
Instructions
Reminder of Charting Goals
- Every chart should tell a story, quickly and effectively
- Extra chart elements create noise, and get in the way of the story
- It is a best practice to remove as much excess ink (noise) as you can
The secret of Micro Charting
- Create your chart as you normally would
- Modify all the textual elements to use tiny fonts (6pt or 8pt)
- Set all lines to use 2pt or smaller
- Resize the chart to make it shrink
- With the smaller scale elements, it should still look great!
Hints & tips
- If you ever need to see a full-size version of the chart, select it and go to Print Preview (it will show a full-page rendition of the chart)
- This method creates real charts (not pictures) so they still react to changes in the source data
- Remember that these charts are intended to expose high level problems, not provide solutions
- Providing many charts focused on a single comparison can be faster to consume than one chart with many messages
- 00:04 In this module, I'm reaching temporarily to a different data set, mainly because I
- 00:09 want to show you something that actually got used in the real world.
- 00:13 This is an inventory management dashboard that is based on the format that
- 00:17 we actually deployed in order to check whether or
- 00:20 not inventory counts were being conducted properly.
- 00:24 This particular dashboard here was reviewed and
- 00:26 it took about 15 seconds per line.
- 00:28 The entire point was does the inventory count look reasonable and if it does,
- 00:32 we move on.
- 00:33 If it doesn't, we send somebody back to recount or look for a reason why.
- 00:36 Let me show you how many charts are actually on this page,
- 00:39 because this is one of the key things.
- 00:41 We always want to make sure dashboards are restricted to one page and one page only,
- 00:45 because that's all the attention that we have.
- 00:48 Well here, how many charts are there?
- 00:50 There's a lot, and they're tiny.
- 00:53 But remember, the point here was not to figure out what was going wrong,
- 00:57 the point was to figure out if something was going wrong.
- 01:00 To see whether or not something needed to be changed.
- 01:02 We would quickly scan this and say,
- 01:03 does the actual revenue look like it's in line with budget?
- 01:06 Is it reasonable?
- 01:07 Is it what we expect based on what's happened this period?
- 01:10 Is there a theoretical shrinkage going up too high, or is swinging?
- 01:14 What's happening with the actual versus budgeted costs that get sold?
- 01:17 And do these things all make sense in context?
- 01:19 So we would go down, and we would take a look at these.
- 01:21 And if you saw a chart that did something like this where we've got a huge
- 01:25 shrinkage that came out.
- 01:26 We would send our manager back to do an inventory recount at this point because
- 01:30 something looked wrong.
- 01:32 We might see that if something was left that the way,
- 01:35 the next month it would go the other direction.
- 01:36 We'd say okay, that looks like a correction and we're okay with that.
- 01:39 But this is it.
- 01:40 About 15 seconds per line to look at all four of the charts for
- 01:43 each individual product type and boom, they're off and running.
- 01:46 The question is how do we build these?
- 01:48 Because every one of these is a tiny chart.
- 01:50 And it's a real chart.
- 01:51 How do I know?
- 01:52 Well, because I can select the chart and
- 01:55 if I go to print preview, I can see the full page version of it.
- 01:59 This makes it a chart.
- 02:01 This is one of the features that's actually there.
- 02:02 So no matter how small you make your chart,
- 02:04 you can always blow it up to a full size screen, which is kind of cool.
- 02:08 So how do we build the individual components?
- 02:10 Well, let's take a look at the dashboard source page for a second.
- 02:14 There's lots of data, tons of data and you'll notice that on the right hand side
- 02:19 we have the individual charts that we created.
- 02:22 If I go and zoom in on this page a little bit more you can see that we can get into
- 02:26 the chart, we can grab it and we can take a look at, let's say the title.
- 02:32 Notice the title font-size, it's 7.2 font.
- 02:36 What about the axis size?
- 02:37 It's six point, six point and six point.
- 02:42 So basically what we did is we grabbed every one of these
- 02:45 charts that was created by default.
- 02:47 And we went through each individual element customizing it
- 02:51 to change the font sizes down to as small we we could get them so
- 02:54 that we could shrink these guys down.
- 02:56 You'll notice that six point isn't even in the ledger here.
- 03:00 If I wanted to go and try and make this four point, I could do that and
- 03:03 make it even tinier.
- 03:04 Okay, so even though you don't see that option by default, it is there.
- 03:07 And we customized every single element to make these things as small as we
- 03:11 possibly could.
- 03:13 This was the secret to what we call micro charting.
- 03:16 It uses real charts to plot real data but with a really, really shrunk down feature.
- 03:22 So that when we actually use the regular pieces, let me show you what happens if we
- 03:25 go the other way and we set this back to what you might see by default.
- 03:28 We would get charts that look like this, which really wouldn't
- 03:32 help us very much at all, so that's why we shrink all these things down.
- 03:35 So that as we scroll them open and close using our little arrows on the side here,
- 03:40 that shows nicely in this particular format.
- 03:42 But when we shrink it down, we want those font sizes smaller.
- 03:45 One other thing that's probably of note in this particular dashboard here
- 03:51 is this particular area with this label.
- 03:54 You'll notice that this cell is actually merged and centered in order to actually
- 03:57 make a vertical label that is Showing in this particular fashion.
- 04:02 So we went to format cells, we merged it and we've rotated our text.
- 04:09 This is how we were able to actually get these bands that show up for
- 04:12 bottled beer with the four charts that we actually have here as well.
- 04:15 So again, it's a different set of techniques for working with these.
- 04:19 But the nice piece about this is we can take these charts,
- 04:22 we can shrink down all the elements.
- 04:23 Every single piece is selectable, so
- 04:25 we can make the lines a little bit thinner if these are a little bit too big.
- 04:29 We could grab one of these lines here and say you know what,
- 04:31 I wanna format the data series on this.
- 04:33 I'm gonna go to the fill, I'll take a look at the line and
- 04:37 maybe I'll change this to say make this line a little bit finer.
- 04:39 We want a little bit thinner just to make sure that the chart shrinks down properly.
- 04:43 So every element can be customized to make it as small as possible to make the chart
- 04:48 still render when you shrink it down, so you can fit as many as you want on a page.
- 04:52 Remember that the point again is very quick access to the data
- 04:57 to identify problems.
- 04:58 And if your charts can do that you can use this technique to make an entire page of
- 05:01 them that can be reviewed in just a couple of minutes.
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