New Excel Charts to improve your productivity

Take a sneak peek at our chart tips and improve your spreadsheets

Microsoft has been improving the Office suite more frequently in the recent years. The features are based on what people are looking for in general and with the aim of saving time for end users. All the changes are conducted by a mixed team of project managers, team leaders, analysts, and administrators to ensure they are relevant and easy to use. In this article, we will provide some useful tips to help you make use of some of these features in your Excel spreadsheets.

New Chart Types

Charts are a particularly useful and popular feature in Excel as people often need to visualize their data. So, it's good to know how to master them to achieve your goals. Microsoft introduced several new chart types in Excel 2016: Funnel, Waterfall, Sunburst, TreeMap, Histogram, and Pareto charts.

Whilst there are some fantastic new charts in Excel 2016. Charts are only useful if the nature of the data works with that type of chart. To see if your data is appropriate, highlight the data and use the ‘Recommended Charts’ button. Down the left side excel will show which charts might work best for your data.

Let’s see some examples

Funnel Chart

Funnel charts are especially useful in sales, marketing, and other departments to show data through different stages in a process.

Waterfall Chart

Waterfall charts are recommended to show movements of amounts of data in and out, for example.

Sunburst Chart

The sunburst chart is ideal for displaying hierarchical data. Each level of the hierarchy is represented by one ring or circle with the innermost circle at the top of the hierarchy.

TreeMap Chart

Excel 2016's new Treemap chart offers an interesting way to visualize a hierarchy of data. With it, you can compare data from distinct categories at a glance, such as revenue for a bookstore by book genre and sub-genres or laptop sales by manufacturer and model, for example.

Histogram Chart

A histogram chart is good at showing how your data are distributed. For example, if we had a data set showing how many daily hits a website received over a year, we might want to know how many days received between 100 and 150 hits, 150 and 200 hits, 200 and 250 hits and so on. In the example below, we demonstrate with price book range of a bookshop.

Pareto Chart

The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. So, for example, 80% of sales come from 20% of clients. A Pareto or sorted histogram chart contains both columns sorted in descending order and a line representing the cumulative total percentage. Pareto charts highlight the biggest factors in a data set and are considered one of the seven basic tools of quality control as it's easy to see the most common problems or issues.

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