Skip to main content

5 Terrific Free Excel Add-Ins For Visualization and Presentations


According to research done by IDC, the total amount of data in the world will grow 300 times from the 133 billion gigabytes in the year 2005, to 40 trillion gigabytes in 2020. That's an estimated 5,200 gigabytes for every man, woman and child on earth! While we're not short of data, we need to visualize and present the data better so that they make more impact. Here are 5 add-ins you have to check out whether you're creating dashboards or want to make a presentation with impact.


Sparklines for Excel (Excel 2007/2010/2013)


Sparklines for Excel is an open source solution that will help you build great looking dashboards and waterfall charts that not only glean insights but also impress management. There are currently 14 charts including Line, Pie, Pareto, Bullet, XY, Scatter, Bar, Column, Stripe and more are on the way. 

One of our favorites that we think you'll find useful if in Finance or Management is the Cascade or Waterfall chart:

Here's a great dashboard for web traffic analysis, using bulletcharts, linecharts and variancecharts:


The other big plus for Sparklines is that it is available for older versions of Excel - it's easy to forget that not everyone has Excel 2013.  

Bing Maps (Excel 2013)


The Bing Maps add-in makes it easy to plot locations and visualize your data through Bing Maps in Excel. Using location data from a given column and plot it on a Bing Map. It also provides basic data visualization using your location data.
   

There is some room for improvement with this add-in. It would be great if you could create heat-maps and remove the "bing" logo at the bottom. But it's a good start.

Plotly Charts (Excel 2013)


Simple and easy to use, Plotly allows you to create interactive charts quickly. Heat Maps, histograms, bubble charts and box plots are all available. For more information about the project, check out their site.

Geographic Heat Map (Excel 2013)

If you have sales, cost or user-base data for different states in the U.S., this add-in will help you present that data graphically. At the moment, it is only available for the United States. We hope they expand their offering to cover other geographical regions.

TinyGraphs (Excel 2003/2007)


One of the original sparklines software that we used with Excel 2007,TinyGraphs is an open source add-in for Excel that as the name suggests, creates mini column graphs, and area graphs from a row of data. These are then put together to create rich dashboards. If your company hasn't upgraded to Excel 2010 and beyond, you should check out TinyGraphs when thinking about creating dashboards.

So there you have it - five of our favorite free add-ins for presentation and data visualization. We've seen an increase in the number of these type of add-ins and apps as the amount of data we process increases. At the enterprise level, there's Tableau and Qlik and we hope to do a review of their product offerings sometime soon. Stay tuned for that!

Title Image Credit: Sparklines for Excel
Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownApril 20, 2016 at 9:43 PM

    Just wish to say your article is as surprising.

    The clarity to your post is simply great and that i could
    suppose you’re a professional on this subject.
    Well with your permission let me to clutch your feed to stay up to date with approaching post.

    Thank you a million and please continue the rewarding
    work.
    Tableau Guru
    www.sqiar.com

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to View YouTube Shorts in the Regular YouTube Player

YouTube's "Shorts" is YouTube’s answer to TikTok and Instagram reels but let’s be honest, the YouTube Shorts player lacks some functionality, such as the ability to fast forward and go back in the video. However, you might be surprised to know that every video that loads in the "Shorts" player is actually a regular video, and by changing the URL slightly, you can load the same video in the regular player along with all the functionality of a traditional YouTube video. Changing the URL Changing the URL is the easiest way to switch the player from a technical standpoint. It’s so easy even your grandma can do it, as long as she knows how to type an address into the address bar of a browser.   Let’s use this super popular short video about AI taking over ping pong as an example. Look in the URL bar of a video playing in the "Shorts" player, where you should see the text Shorts/. Replace that text with watch?v= and load the new URL. So in this...
Post a Comment
Read more

Create QR Codes in Excel With VBA

Need to automate the creation of QR Codes? Excel and VBA can help with that! Here's how to do it in less than 15 lines of code. What we're looking to do is have a URL in a cell and then we're going to use a function that we create in VBA call Google APIs to create the code. Here's a video that explains the whole process of creating a user defined function in VBA that will create QR Codes: Code to create QR Codes in Excel with VBA Open up your Visual Basic editor and insert the following code and then save. To call the function, type =GETQRCODES(Cell Address) where Cell Address is the address of the cell which contains a URL that you want to send your user to. Function GETQRCODES(QRCode As String)     Dim URL As String     URL = "https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=100x100&&cht=qr&chl=" & QRCode     ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert(URL).Select     With Selection.ShapeRange(1)         .Name = "QR_CODE_" & QRCode...
Post a Comment
Read more

How To Change Bluetooth Name On Android

This post will take you step-by-step through the process of changing the Bluetooth name of your devices on an Android phone. There are pictures as references in case you get lost along the way. Change Bluetooth Name On Android | Step-by-step 1. Unlock your Android phone and go to Settings Unlock your phone and click on the Settings Icon It goes without saying, but the first thing you need to do is unlock your phone. By default, the settings icon will be on your home page like in the picture above. If you don't have the settings icon, you can search for 'Settings' in the Android search bar. 2. In the Settings page, click on Bluetooth Click on the Bluetooth settings to open up the Bluetooth Settings menu Click on the Bluetooth settings which should be at the top of your Settings page. If it doesn't, scroll down till you find it or just search for it in the search bar at the top of the Settings page. 3. Click On Device Name To Change Your Phone's Bluetooth Name Click o...
Post a Comment
Read more