How This Bear Market Compares - NY Times

Posted on 13 October 2008

A problem frequently encountered with displaying multiple series with overlapping data points within a single line chart is that they just seem to entangle themselves. To get an idea of all the data point that a series represents, the user has to either mentally segregate it from the rest or click on it to highlight the particular line. The NY Times recently published a chart How This Bear Market Compares that tries to solve this problem by highlighting ... Continue Reading

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It’s all coming to and end now…..

Posted on 11 October 2008

......and sanity is going to prevail soon. I am an eternal optimist and my understanding is that the extreme volatility seen in the global markets signals that the capitulation is coming to an end. 6 months from today, we will looks back at this point and think what a fantastic opportunity it represented. After the worst is over, the markets will return to a level ... Continue Reading

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Get each of your spreadsheets a customized menu

Posted on 09 October 2008

Those who’ve worked with elaborate multi-worksheet dashboards would realize the usefulness of adding a customized menu option. Apart from other things, a customized menu option can be used to guide the user to specific portions of an excel spreadsheet. For example, if you have a long report consisting of multiple charts, pivots, images and data fields, you may want to spare the reader the effort of locating the most useful (or important) portions by creating a new menu option and ... Continue Reading

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How to create waterfall chart in excel in 2 minutes

Posted on 08 October 2008

A waterfall chart is used to represent a set of figures when they all impact the same derived number. A waterfall chart helps to link the individual values to a whole. A profit and loss statement is a good example where the magnitude of each figure has an impact on a derived number (which happens to be Profit in this case). A colleague of mine recently had a budgeting exercise assigned to him where he had to project the P&L figures ... Continue Reading

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Bar(ring) Chart

Posted on 07 October 2008

I have always been a big fan of New York Times especially when it comes to creating cutting edge graphics. A few are mentioned in some of my previous posts. NY Times - Home Foreclosure Graph and The rise and fall of movies - NY Times. However once in a while, they err and publish..well...lets say less than world class charts. To my dismay one such chart was published recently: Home Prices in Selected Cities Through July ’08 ... Continue Reading

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How the mighty have fallen

Posted on 05 October 2008

Below is a list of how much the global markets have fallen in the past year. The highs and the lows may not coincide with the beginning and end of the one year period. Data for week ending 5-Oct-08. S&P 500 52 week low: 1,098 52 week high: 1,576 Correction: 30%... Continue Reading

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