Dynamic Excel charts

December 9, 2009

Here’s a neat little trick to dramatically cut down the number of separate charts in a spreadsheet model.

Say you’ve got a monthly profit and loss statement with many rows of revenue and expense information. Once you’ve got all of your data in a worksheet you now want to analyse the information. Often you’ll want to select a particular line in the P&L and see a chart of the data. Well, you could just create a nice looking chart of that row of data and position it somewhere on your worksheet. Then you could repeat the process for every row of data that you’re interested in. Well this is lot of manual effort, plus it adds clutter to your worksheet. After all, you may only be interested in viewing one chart at a time. (Let’s assume for now that you don’t need to print these all out.) Read the rest of this entry »