Analytics Education STEM

Animating Charts in Excel and beyond

Some time ago I demonstrated how to create Time-lapse animations in Excel in my post here. Part of that procedure utilized a short-lived but cool feature called ‘PowerView’. Unfortunately, as of late 2021, Microsoft has removed support for PowerView in Excel (that made this time-lapse animation possible) and instead is encouraging users to use PowerBI […]

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Education STEM

Predicting missing/unknown information

Analysts often need to fill in the blanks in order to make longer-term decisions, or just to model different scenarios by making credulous predictions. In this post, I share just one of such scenarios and demonstrate how to make predictions using both statistical formulas manually and Excel’s feature. Lastly, we’ll see the difference between the […]

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Analytics Education STEM Work

A Risk Assessment Map—my approach

I’ve seen many pretty risk assessment maps over time. The issue I see with most of them is that they’re more of an illustration than a method meaning, they’re customized visuals with manual graphics that don’t scale well for different projects. In the post, I’ll share my approach…it’s based on applying basic statistical concept, development […]

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Analytics Education STEM

Measuring and visualizing performance from raw transactions

Scenario We have transactional data for 3 months. We want to compare any month’s sales performance with our goals by category of products sold. The following information is available in one dataset: OrderID, Product, qty, price, date of order as they occurred. As we see below, they’re not tallied or grouped or sorted in any […]

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Analytics Education STEM

Using Stock Price Charts On Humans

Using the same dataset, I’ve shown in my earlier blog: Scattered Data To A Butterfly, Or A Tornado! https://flyingsalmon.net/blog/?p=2194 on how to present similar information visually and add interactivity, in this post, I’ll show other ways to present the information visually and walk through the pros and cons of each. I won’t be using any […]

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Analytics Coding STEM

Scattered Data to a Butterfly, or a Tornado!

What do butterflies and tornadoes have in common? 🙂 Butterfly charts aka Tornado charts are a special type of Bar chart where the data categories are listed vertically instead of the usual horizontal layout. It’s suitable for comparing different variables between two groups (e.g. male/female, apartment/house, car/boat, etc. etc.) and what variables you measure is […]

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Analytics Education STEM

Why Pareto? Using 80/20 rule in the real-world.

The Pareto principle states that about 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes in many real-world events. You can use this to, say, identify 80% of your best-selling categories, or conversely the worst performing categories/items. The uses are limitless, really. And they don’t have to be only about $$$. Graphically, it’s a […]

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Analytics Education Health STEM

Virus Wiping Away Toilet Papers in 2020!

Amazed (at the stupidity) and fascinated (by idiocy) by binge and panic shopper, I was compelled to ponder specifically about the toilet paper shortage in light of the recent pandemic (“corona virus”). This blog is will reflect on the reasoning provided by shoppers, and psychologists, a look at the economic statistics and realities of the […]

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