TM Custom Radar Chart add-in

A Radar Chart, also known as a Spider Chart, visually compares several entities (products, organizations, investment opportunities, or even people) on multiple dimensions. For example, a manager of a diagnostic imaging (radiology) center might want to compare her facility with the competition on dimensions related to patients such as Time To Appointment, Report Turnaround Time, …

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Excel Mashup #1

Recently, Microsoft introduced a way to create a “mashup” using Excel. Fellow MVP, Jan Karel, put together a tutorial on how he created his first mashup. It helped me understand the basics, which are also well explained by Microsoft itself. In my case, for a long, long time I have wanted to draw any graph …

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Geocoding with Excel and VBA

Before one can position an address (a street address or a town itself) on a map, it must be converted to geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude). Then, that latitude and longitude is mapped to a particular location on the map. Figure 1 shows several thousand U.S. cities and towns on a Mercator projection map. Well, …

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Slicer or Data Validation list

This note documents a somewhat creative – and I suspect an unintended – way of using a slicer. A slicer is a control element introduced with Excel 2010. It is a large easy-to-use control to filter the results of one PivotTable or even multiple PivotTables. I like the UI look-and-feel of a Slicer and decided …

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Introducing TM Retro Slicer beta 1

Those who have used an Excel 2010 slicer may have wanted to see that capability in earlier versions of Excel. I like what Microsoft did with slicers in 2010 and wanted to extend that capability backwards. For those who haven’t used a slicer, it is a filter on a particular pivot field shown as an …

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Introducing TM Tornado

Tornado diagrams graphically display the result of single-factor sensitivity analysis. This lets one evaluate the risk associated with the uncertainty in each of the variables that affect the outcome. Single-factor analysis means that we measure the effect on the outcome of each factor, one at a time, while holding the others at their nominal (or …

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TM PivotTable Dashboard

A client wanted to visualize a table of data with a dashboard where each chart represented specific information in the table. I had two choices: 1) Develop a client-specific solution and charge the client the entire development cost, or 2) develop a more general solution, market it to a broader customer base and charge the …

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