How to Analyze and Visualize Data with Excel?

Excel has been around for far too long helping large corporates, small businesses, and even start-ups to best manage their data in terms of analyzing and visualization. You can use excel to display your data in whatever way you deem fit. Data analysis results can be visualized as special charts that nominate or highlight the main interests so that your audience can quickly work out with the details that you want them to study or observe. Excel is not a hard tool or software to learn and there are a variety of courses available online that can help you with it too.

If you are a data analyst then you already know that having the right tool while performing analysis matters the most and just so it happens the visualization of the data is also a must-have. So, without further ado let's get right into it such as how you can analyze and visualize data in Excel;

Visualizing data in excel

There are different types of charts that are available in excel for you to pound over. Visualization of the data in the form of charts makes it easier for the illustrator and the audience to grab the essence of the presentation. Multiple types of charts are available in excel which you can use such as a bar chart or line chart in which your data is represented with symbols. Such as in the bar chart it will be represented as bars and in the line chart, it will be represented as the horizontal or vertical lines.    

Microsoft Excel provides you with a chance of using multiple charts, using these charts you can customize your data or use various recommendations provided by excel for customizing it. In this article, you will come around various techniques that can be used to create different visualization charts in Excel and how you can have a better chance of visualizing your data.

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Creating combination charts 

When you have two different sets of data that you want to correlate or compare with each other using combination charts can really help you around. You can access various combo charts in Excel's insert drop-down menu.

Let's start with an example, shall we? suppose that you have to work on designing a prediction report about the current intended profits of a company. The combo chart can be the best way to achieve this, here is a quick illustration of how you can access the combo chart in Excel and actually work your way through it; 

• Simply click on the DESIGN tab under the chart tools and then on the Ribbon 
• Go to the type group and click on change the chart type 
• The change chart type dialog will suddenly appear 
• From the drop-down menu click on the combo chart
• A simple preview of your chart will appear under the custom combination 
• If you like what you see then simply click “OK” and the dialog box will close leaving behind a dedicated chart on the screen 

The chart on the screen will clearly display be intended and actual profit numbers. Whereas the actual chart numbers will be displayed in the form of vertical blocks and the intended numbers that you're currently working on or want to see will be displayed as straight lines touching the corners of vertical charts.  This is the height of data visualization as it displays different trends of your data in the form of a subtle chart.

These combination charts are merely used when there are two different sets of data that need to be compared with each other. But given the fact that your priorities and requirements for data visualization will change from time to time, there are various other kinds of data charts included within excel that you can access and implement in a customized manner. You don't simply have distinct win combination only and thus can work with the following as well; 

• Horizontal Dumbbells  
• Vertical Dumbbells 
• Overlapping bars 
• Diverging stacked bar 
• Lollipop 
• Slopegraph 
• Ranking data 
• Bullet chart 
• Confidence intervals 
• Standard deviation 

All of these are the examples of various different charts that you can access in Excel and then mold them according to your own requirements or sets of data for analyzation purposes.  

Data Analysis with excel

The data analyzation simply means that you have a combination of different data sets which can be either raw or in processed form and then you have to work on it with different models for analyzing purposes. Microsoft Excel can help you with it. Different insights can be extracted out of this data, suggestions, or predictions made and the core favorable element is separated from the data.

You can allot the raw data into different sections, rearrange it according to the requirements that you have, color code it, make it fall into ascending or descending patterns, and many other things. But in order to grab the very idea of how to do that you have to learn excel as there is no other way around it. But as for what kind of things can be done in correspondence with data analysis then here is a list;

• Sort; You can sort the raw data into single or multiple columns or even take some of it to different rows
• Filter; Filter the data in such a way to display only that data which syncs with your ordering patterns or the data that meets a particular criteria
• Conditional formatting; other formatting options for your data might include the highlighting of cells and blocks, giving certain color to the highlighted elements or changing the pattern of data display
• Charts; As mentioned earlier for the data visualization purposes different types of charts can be used in Excel
• Tables; You can add or remove tables out of your own needs, these will provide you with a more dynamic way of assessing or customizing your data

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