Excel Advanced Charts: Comparison to Budget, Previous Year and Forecast or Outlook

Jan 27, 2016 Excel Charts
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Excel Advanced Charts: Measuring performance, doing comparisons and predicting the future - Comparison to Budget, Previous Year and Forecast or Outlook.

Not sure which charts & methods to use to show performance and variances? This lecture will provide you with some examples that are covered in my Excel online visualization course.

Summary: This lecture provides you with an overview of different methods used for visualizing performance comparisons, deviations, as well as future estimated performance. It introduces you to the topics and charts that you will learn in this section as well as the next two sections.

This is specially beneficial for controllers and financial analysts looking to enhance their corporate reports to include better & improved charts.

Detail: In every corporate report, you have sections where you make comparison of actual values to budget or target values. In this section I will show you the most effective ways of making these comparisons.
You will also compare your performance to PY to see if you did better or worse. There are different way of doing this. My favorites are using symbols and using what I call the pin chart. I will show you these in the next section.

Lastly you will also have reports where you show how you expect to be performing for the rest of the year. These are called your forecasts or outlooks. I will show you some methods of displaying these effectively in Excel in the section after next.

One point to emphasize is the consistent use of colors in your reports. Make sure your actuals have the same colour throughout your reports. They should be clearly in focus and visible. Basically stand out against budget, target, previous year, forecasts and any other series you have.

In the same manner, be consistent with the use of color for your other series.

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