Download - How to make bullet charts
HOW TO MAKE BULLET CHARTS data visualisation tool
Poor Ok Good
Target Actual
Good Job!
Why use bullet charts?
• Want to compare performance of a metric e.g. Sales in two periods e.g. this year v’s last year (or target) on a continuum that also shows Poor, Ok and Good performance
• Quick to read and understand (if familiar with them) …
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Product A
Sales YTD v's Last Year
How to read Bullet Charts
• The Scale here is ‘000 … hundred thousand • Product A YTD is 100 (as in €100,000) • Target (or alternatively last year’s Sales) is represented by thin blue
line. • The first dark purple shade is Poor Performance • The next shade (green) is OK performance • The final shaded area in Red denotes good performance … last year
almost made this mark • Conclusion … Way off the mark. Needs further examination. Could be
early in the year or else product is not being focused on, or have competitors come in.
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'000 Euro
Product A
Sales YTD v's Last Year Target
Step 1
• Download Excel Add on and Install http://www.aculocity.com/BulletGraph.aspx**
• Outcome – Bullet chart tab in Excel
** The author is not associated with this business and this presentation does not imply an endorsement for this organisation but the software works!
To create bullet chart
• Add a data chart as follows
• Can be linked to data in other sheets
YTD 2012
Sales 100000 268,842.07
Revenue Retailers 80000 259200.00
Revenue Online 20000 9642.07
Cost of Sales 90000 178,629.25
Gross Profit 10000 90,212.82
Owner's Salary / Drawings 0 9,000.00
Total Expenses 25000 96,855.04
Net Profit / Loss -15000 (6,642.22)
To create bullet chart cont.
• Click on bullet chart • Select ADD NEW BULLET GRAPH • This pop up appears
Menu Boxes explained
• Graph Location is taken from the name of your Tab. No need to worry about it further!
• Not sure what this is called so will refer to it as ‘cell insert dropdown’
Menu Boxes explained
• Quantitative Scale Start
– Generally is left at Zero
– But it can be set to negative value … more on this later!
-500 -400 -300 -200 -100 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
Net Profit
Menu Boxes explained cont.
• Quantitative Scale Tick Interval – The default is 100 – Decide when you decide on
• Quantitative Scale Ticks – Default is 10 … ensures a nice scale chart. If goes
beyond 15 the chart gets unmanageable. This chart has 5 ticks.
• If you multiply the tick interval by the number of scale ticks you get a number which is the Max of the Scale. As such if you want the scale to go to 1,0000,000 you have a few options: – 100000 Tick Interval by 10 Ticks – 50000 Tick Interval by 20 Ticks
• You can change all these in a minute anyways…
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Bullet Graph
• Featured measure … in our case Sales YTD … this is the one that will be the column. BTW if the value changes the column changes automatically.
• Comparative measure .. In our case Sales Target results in the Target Line. … what fixed target or benchmark are you comparing to!
Menu Boxes explained cont.
Featured measure
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'000 Euro
Product A
Sales YTD v's Last Year Comparative Measure
Value of Shaded Areas
• The Bullet Chart allows comparison to Poor, OK and Good Performance which by default are set at 70%, 71-89%, and 90-100% … these defaults can be changed … see next slides
Bottom 70%
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'000 Euro
Product A
Sales YTD v's Last Year Top 10%
To edit the resulting chart
• When you have selected (highlighted) a Bullet Chart, and click on the BULLET GRAPH Tab the following menu appearing allowing the selected Bullet Chart to be edited
Button Graph Tab Options
• Adjust Orientation … to change from a horizontal (bar) to a vertical (column) chart.
• Change the label of the column (Product A in previous examples)
• Change the font size etc etc
• Change the values of the Shaded Areas … value of Poor, Ok and Good Performance. Click on reverse to see what it does!
Other Edit functions
• Design allows changes to the Bar Chart .. E.g. add Colour
• Layout lets you add a Chart Title…. But don’t put on the legend.
• Format lets you work on Background colours
• For my Bullet Chart, I wanted lots of ticks but still wanted a small chart.
• For this I added another two columns to my table and used those to create the Bullet Chart. See table on next slide.
And finally
Featured measure
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'000 Euro
Product A
Sales YTD v's Last Year Comparative Measure
This presentation was uploaded to Slideshare by Donncha Hughes in
July 2013
www.startuphughes.com