Yesterday, I was tasked with graphing survey results for a PowerPoint presentation. My tool of choice: Office Excel 2007. I was expected to come up with professional-looking and easy-to-understand graphs (after all, they will be presented to vice-presidents and directors). As an added requirement, I also needed to present both values and percentages. However, as I found out yesterday, Excel 2007 does not allow the presentation of both percentages and values in the same graph. I had to come up with an alternative that will allow my manager to update the graphs with new data going forward, but without forcing her to mess with the graphs.
There are some ways to accomplish this. One way is to present values in the graphs, and insert text boxes that link back to percentages in a data section of the spreadsheet. This can be tricky with bar and pie graphs, since the position of the text boxes would need to change depending on the height and width of each graph segment. Another way, perhaps trickier, is to set one graph on top of another, with one presenting percentages and the other presenting a data table with values. My solution was a combination of the above. I made two sheets -- one with data values that my manager would enter, and one with percentages based upon the data values. One big graph shows the values, while a mini-graph on the corner shows the percentages.
Now, the best part of doing this in Excel 2007 (as opposed to OpenOffice, KOffice or Excel 2003) is that the built-in templates and built-in color schemes allow for an explosive combination. Since my company's standard PowerPoint template is dark, I chose to make the graphs black with shinny colors. Instead of typical rectangular bars, I used cylinders. This, combined with the mini-graph on the corner, made some serious kick-ass graphs!
It's too bad that I didn't have enough data to come up with some statistical analysis. That would have allowed me to make more kick-ass graphs that showed some interesting conclusions. Yet, I am sure these graphs will make people go, "Wow!"
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