Step charts are suitable for showing fluctuating or irregular values over time. There’s no built-in Step chart type in Excel, so most people use a Line chart instead, which is not really ideal or sometimes accurate (I’ll explain that below). With proper data shaping, it’s possible to create Step charts in Excel. In this post, […]
Author: tony R.
Building an at-a-glance holidays timeline
Today, I share the steps required to build an overall holiday calendar timeline in Excel. This allows you to see the entire year’s holidays with different categories (e.g. company holidays, federal, personal vacation, etc.) at a glance without requiring you to navigate month by month to see the events. All the year’s key events can […]
Prisoners of the world
In this post, I touch on a complex and touchy issue of the human society. We look at the prisoners’ population around the world for selected countries, while casting a wide net of diversity. With the data and visualizations presented, we should be able to answer: Which countries have the highest number of prisoners? Which […]
Combinations in Python
In this post, I present the concept of calculating combinations from different choices. For educational fun, I will combine various parts of the bodies from two different creatures and see how many combinations we get. You’ll get to enter the animals to combine, and even get a name for your new mutant! If you have […]
Present Value and Future Need with Inflation
Ugh…Inflation! No one seems to like it but what does it mean? How can we measure how much purchasing power we’re losing due to inflation? Questions such as these and more are answered in this post. Inflation is the rate at which the general level of prices for goods and services rises, eroding the purchasing […]
Overlay Real-time Animations Using Pygame
In this post, I demonstrate how to load an image file and do some simple overlay animations, such as drawing different shapes of different colors at ever-changing locations over the image using nothing but the good-old Pygame library. The code and working demo are embedded below. I wanted to load a static image of my […]
Gold Mining Decision with Monte Carlo
In this blog, I’ll demonstrate (with complete code, visualization, and explanation) how to make a decision with several unknowns using Monte Carlo simulation and analysis in Python. We’ll tackle a hypothetical scenario of whether or not we should mine for Gold. We want to know if it’s worth mining for gold in the following situation:We […]
Calculating Playoff Chances
With the NFL regular season winding down after week 15, we have a pretty good idea of which teams are definitely out of the playoff hunt, which teams have clinched a playoff berth, but the rest are still up in the air. In this blog post, I calculate the chances of making the playoff for […]
Vehicles: Number of cars, density and more from around the world
In this post, I’m sharing some data on number of vehicles, their density taking into account the population, and other interesting metrics for a selected number of countries around the world. The visualizations and analysis will take you on a journey of telling the stories and takeaways from the numbers. The selected countries presented here […]
Plotting ranges of values – Cat metrics
In this purr-fectly delightful blog post, I’ll guide you through steps to meaningfully depict ranges of values in Excel, all the while crafting irresistibly cute charts—no graphic skills needed! You’ll discover a few charts showcasing upper and lower values, Means, and custom markers. Using data such as the lifespans, weights, and prices of different cat […]