Guest blogger Emily Warn is co-owner of Two Pens, which provides blogging services and teaches business how to write content that grows a social media following.<\/i><\/p>\n
My writer friends think I’m a geek. You can do what?!\u00a0 I can create a spreadsheet with book sales numbers that can be sorted by name and number.\u00a0 I know that is only the first rung of Excel Geek-dom, and unlike my compatriots, I aspire to climb into the ranks of those who know how to create snazzy charts and perform other formatting feats.\u00a0 Perhaps I’ll be able to brand myself as a writer who plays with numbers.<\/p>\n
I don’t want to show off so much as make my data tell a story by presenting it visually. That way even my writer friends can see, and so analyze, which author is booting the others off the bestseller list.<\/p>\n
Earning geek bragging rights just got easier with the new Quick Analysis\u00a0feature in Excel 2013. It lets you transform your data into visual formats really easily.<\/p>\n
When you select a range of data,\u00a0Quick Analysis<\/b> appears in the lower-right corner of your data set:<\/p>\n
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Click it and you’ll see options for converting your data into visual forms: charts, tables, sparklines, and formatting. (Another option lets you calculate totals.)<\/p>\n
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For this exercise, we’ll focus on using the Chart option and use a sample spreadsheet of book sales by 19th<\/sup> and early 20th<\/sup> century authors.\u00a0 (I chose forever deceased authors in the public domain to avoid copyright issues.) Here is the imaginary sales data for their books from 2009-2011:<\/p>\n I select all the data, click\u00a0Quick Analysis<\/b>, and then choose Charts<\/b>:<\/p>\n There are lots of choices here. Which chart will best show the authors’ sales rank relative to another author’s for three different years?\u00a0 I hover over each type of chart to see how it presents my data. I settle on the Clustered Column chart because I like how it shows year-to-year sales data per author.<\/p>\n Obviously, in 2009 students were snoozing, but by 2011 the ancients had caught on-across the board.\u00a0 (A country of readers instead of tweeters?)<\/p>\n I click on the chart to add it to my spreadsheet. My choice does not irreversibly muck up my spreadsheet if I decide I don’t like it later. I can delete it, open\u00a0Quick Analysis, and try again.<\/p>\n There’s another reason that I could choose the optimal chart so quickly: the options that Excel displays are based on the types of data in your spreadsheet. For example, you’ll notice that\u00a0Quick Analysis<\/b> didn’t recommend a pie chart. Why? There would be too many slices (authors) to create a meaningful picture, and that shape is difficult to relate to sales per year.<\/p>\n If you need more help choosing a chart, click More Charts<\/b>. In the Recommended Charts<\/b> box, it explains why you would use one chart over another.<\/p>\n The way you work with the other Quick Analysis options–formatting, tables, and sparklines–acts much the same way.<\/p>\n –Emily Warn<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Guest blogger Emily Warn is a writer and confirmed Excel geek. In this post, she demonstrates how to use the new Quick Analysis feature in Excel 2013 to create a spreadsheet with book sales numbers that can be sorted by name and number in order to make data tell a story by presenting it visually. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3368823,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"content-type":[4035],"product":[4047,4036],"audience":[4081,4101,4102],"tags":[],"coauthors":[4437],"class_list":["post-915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","content-type-tips-and-guides","product-excel","product-microsoft-365","audience-enterprise","audience-personal-and-family","audience-small-business"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/p>\n
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Recommended Charts<\/h3>\n
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Other Quick Analysis Options<\/h3>\n