Welcome back! Just saw the latest released data on Big Mac prices world-wide, and the articles showing some simple histograms—and some of them even slapped on a cheesey (pun intended) burger animation to make their hohum horizontal bar charts appear to be more eye-catching. Well, today I’ll show you how to use the same data set as they used, and create much more engaging (yes, more complex than a bar chart, but also far better!) charts.
I’ll create 3 charts all based on the very same simple datasets: We only need 2 fields: Country, and Price.
The first two are bubble charts. The 3rd one is a Pivot chart which actually makes it interactive. They’re shown below with more explanation (with animation) for the Pivot chart below. I downloaded the data from worldatlas.com and the flag images from a public, free domain.
The following bubble chart shows each bubble as a data point, in this case prices (in US$) and the size of the bubble is according to the price. Each data-point for a particular country is shown with its flag! How cool and clear is that?
The next one is a slightly different viewpoint. Here I use a Big Mac burger image and the size of the burger is directly correlated to the price. Because we’re using burger image, we won’t be able to use the flag in one go, instead we’ll use the country’s label for each price-point.
In this chart, I use the whole data set (for 50+ countries) and create an interactive Pivot chart.
The interaction is shown in the animation below. For example, you want to see prices for specific countries. Or you want to see the countries where burger costs $2 or less! Or countries where Big Mac costs $6+! This chart allows you to slice-and-dice and filter many different ways!
Now, you know how good looking and yet useful charts look like in Excel 🙂 Hope you enjoyed them.
