Bill Jelen - Excel 2013 Charts and Graphs

Bill Jelen

800 East 96th Street,
Indianapolis, Indiana 46240 USA

Excel 2013 Charts and Graphs

Copyright 2013 by Que Publishing

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7897-4862-1
ISBN-10: 0-7897-4862-2

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Printed in the United States of America
First Printing: February 2013

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To Zeke Jelen

Bill Jelen, Excel MVP and the host of MrExcel.com, has been using spreadsheets since 1985, and he launched the MrExcel.com website in 1998. Bill was a regular guest on Call for Help with Leo Laporte and has produced more than 1,500 episodes of his daily video podcast, Learn Excel from MrExcel. He is the author of 39 books about Microsoft Excel and writes the monthly Excel column for Strategic Finance magazine. His Excel tips appear regularly in CFO Excel Pro Newsletter and CFO Magazine. Before founding MrExcel.com, Bill Jelen spent 12 years in the trenchesworking as a financial analyst for finance, marketing, accounting, and operations departments of a $500 million public company. He lives near Akron, Ohio, with his wife, Mary Ellen.

I wish to thank Gene Zelazny of McKinsey & Company. Gene was generous with his time and feedback. He indirectly taught me a lot about charting more than a decade ago, when I did a six-month stint on a McKinsey project team. Kathy Villella and Tom Bunzel also provided advice on presentations. Mala Singh of XLSoft Consulting vetted the chapter on using VBA to create charts.

Mike Alexander, my coauthor on the Pivot Table Data Crunching books, helped outline the table of contents for this book and provided many ideas for .

I enjoy the visual delight of every Edward Tufte book. I apologize in advance to E.T. for documenting all the chartjunk that Microsoft lets us add to Excel charts.

Dick DeBartolo is the Daily GizWiz and has been writing for Mad magazine for more than 40 years, since he was 15. The pages of Mad were not where I expected to find inspiration for a charting book, but why not? Thanks to Bob DAmico for illustrating the charts la Mad. The pie chart in is a Dick DeBartolo original, created especially for this book. Many thanks to Dick for being a contributor.

I was visiting Keith Bradburys office in Toronto. Keith makes the completely awesome PDF-to-Excel utility at InvestInTech.com. Between parking the car and entering Keiths office, I saw the most amazing store, managed by David Michaelides. SWIPE is a bookstore dedicated to art and design. This is a beautiful store to browse, and if you go in and reveal that you work in Excel all day, they will sympathetically be very nice to you. In a clash of worlds, David has the original 1984 Mac way up above his cash register because it was the start of desktop publishing. I pointed out that the Mac was where Excel 1.0 got its start in 1985, so we had a common thread in our respective backgrounds. Stop by 401 Richmond Street West (two blocks west of Spadina) to take a look the next time you are in Toronto.

Thanks to Jane Liles at Microsoft for guiding the Excel team through Excel 2013. Thanks to Steve Tullis, Dan Battagin, and Melissa MacBeth for making the Excel Web App render charts better every year. Scott Ruble heads up the charting team and was always generous with his time when I ran into a charting quandary. Robin Wakefield provided help with some charting VBA that was eluding me.

At MrExcel.com, thanks to Barb Jelen, Wei Jiang, Tracy Syrstad, Tyler Nash, and Scott Pierson.

The Microsoft MVPs for Excel are always generous with their time and ideas. Over the years, Ive learned many cool charting tricks from websites maintained by John Peltier, Andy Pope, and Charley Kyd. Turn to the appendix for links to their respective websites. MVP Bob Umlas (the smartest Excel guy I know) served as a great technical editor. I still smile when I recall Bob pointing out that 9. Repeat step 9 for High, Low, and Close lines. was, in itself, a circular reference.

The great team at Pearson of Loretta Yates, Charlotte Kughen, Barbara Hacha, and Seth Kerney were a pleasure to work with.

Finally, thanks to Zeke Jelen, Dom Grossi, and Mary Ellen Jelen.

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