IBCS-style Data Visualization using Excel
(Pie / Donut / Column / Bar charts)
In recent days, together with my friend Imran Haq we have been dedicating ourselves to developing IBCS style charts.
Imran develops his visuals using Power BI (I recommend you look at his works), whereas I develop them in Excel.
It has been an exciting challenge.
In Excel, it would have been impossible to use standard bar, column, pie and donut charts to create the layouts you see below. So I decided to use XY dispersion series exclusively. To draw and fill a shape you can use many segments arranged close to each other. It's exactly the same way we color in shapes on paper by hand. But by using just a little math, trigonometry and other Excel tricks, this game becomes much easier.
What I present on this page is an the Excel template demonstrates how you to draw a multi-pie/donut chart by, placing shapes onto the chart's rectangular grid.
Multi-Pie/Donut Chart
The chart can update dynamically based on the data table here:
The visualisation can be presented a Pie Chart or Donut Chart by simply adjusting the chart width. The radius size is proportional to the Market Size value.
The selected country will mark the chart in a darker grey colour, the rest will appear in a faded/lighter grey. The selected country can be adjusted using a parameter.
Growth is shown as a percentage (green for positive growth, red for negative). The growth bar is set at half the thickness of a donut and a quarter the size of a pie chart (the size of the donut itself varies depending on the Market Size.
The horizontal axis shows country names. The selected country is highlighted in bold.
The chart has a legend in the top-right corner which explains the meaning of the chart’s numerical labels.
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The Growth Label (%) is located on the bottom by default. Depending that grwth bar appear to the right or left growth will, the growth label will move to the right or left of the donut.
Pie Chart Example:
% values rounded to 1 decimal place, (e.g. 15.3%).
The width and height of the cells is determined by specific parameters.
Finally, a version of the Multi-Pie Chart based on the US states diagram:
Column/Bar Chart
For the column/bar chart variants the data table has this layout:
Below are the two versions that do not need explanation:
Special thanks go to Imran Haq for inspiring these charts with his ideas, suggestions and for his help in writing this post.
I will be very happy to receive your suggestions and comments.
I will also be happy if you want to share this post with your network.
#Excel #IBCS #multipiechart #multidonutchart #columnchart #barchart #Dataviz