Need help picking a “good” chart for your Excel data? Chart Advisor to the rescue!

Microsoft Office Labs - Project: Chart Advisor

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Chart Advisor is a prototype that provides an alternate approach for creating charts in Excel 2007. This add-in uses an advanced rules engine to scan your data and, based on predefined rules, displays charts according to score. Top scoring charts are available for you to preview, tweak, and insert into your Excel worksheet.

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Project: Chart Advisor - Chart Advisor - Frequently Asked Questions and Answers

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1. What is Chart Advisor?
Chart Advisor is a prototype Excel Add-In that appears as a button on the Insert ribbon next to the standard charting tools.  It attempts to automate the process of chart generation by using an advanced rules engine to scan your data for properties that inherently make good charts.  It will generate some charts, rank them, and display the set as thumbnails in a new dialog.  From this dialog you can manipulate the charts by changing how the data is mapped and filter out data from the chart.  When done, you can insert the chart back into the spreadsheet.

2. Why do I need Chart Advisor?
It is useful if you are curious to explore an alternative way to create charts and help us understand if this improves your productivity.

3. What are the requirements / limitations?
Operating System needs to be either XP or Vista. You'll need a copy of Excel 2007. Also, because this is a prototype, we're limited to 8,000 cells for analysis.

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12. How does Chart Advisor pick charts?
Chart Advisor uses an advanced rules engine to scan your data for properties that inherently make good charts and then uses this analysis to pick different chart types that will render graphs conveying useful information. It does this in 3 steps. First, columns/rows of data are scored to determine how they might fit into the 3 chart fields (category, values, legend). Second, these mappings are tried in the various chart types supported to see if they 'look good.' Finally, formatting rules are applied to enhance the overall appearance of the chart.

13. Can I modify the rules?
If you have ideas on how to improve the rules, feel free to post to the discussion board.

14. What are the known issues?
(1) Chart Advisor only chooses one direction for the data based on initial inspection. So, if your data happens to flow in rows, Chart Advisor may choose to group by columns and give less desirable charts. The fix for this is to transpose your data using Excel's cut and paste special feature.
(2) Performance suffers as the data sets grow larger. Smaller datasets are considerably faster.
(3) The hidden sheet used for intermediate calculations isn't deleted. The data is deleted from the sheet, but the actual sheet is still present in the file. To remove it, you simply need to right click on a sheet tab and select Unhide. The menu that pops up will show you the hidden sheets. From here you can select one and unhide it.
(4) The undo history is cleared when Chart Advisor is run.

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The Office Labs guys are at it again, this time with help for those of us who need a little help (okay, I need allot of help ;) in picking a “good” chart for our data in Excel. I dig how it shows the why behind the decision, why a chart is considered good for your data, etc. (cough… insert comment here about how having the source to these Office Labs projects would be cool… cough… ;)