Transforming your syndicated data into business insight
For many years, I used Excel and never knew about VLOOKUP. Oh, the hours I wasted! I’m writing this post to save you from the same sad, productivity-sapping fate. What is VLOOKUP? It’s a simple Excel function that allows you to pull information from one data set to another, based on some matching value. While […]
One of the most powerful graphs is the line chart. Line charts allow you to: Decode underlying trends over time Compare trends for different products or markets Explore relationships between different measures In addition to making it easier to see trends, you will typically use a line graph because there’s just too much data to […]
If you’ve worked with CPG data for a while, you probably know that incremental volume estimates can fluctuate and look a little funky (especially in weeks with little or no trade promotion). I wrote a post about this phenomena a few weeks ago. As I stated then, usually these fluctuations are small relative to total volume […]
The bar chart is probably the most commonly used type of graph and this post talks about what kind of data this works well for. In this post I’ll talk about using bar charts to compare various products and geographies but for one fact and one time period. This is part of a series of […]
Here’s something fun that I came across this week, as movies were in the news due to the announcement of Oscar nominations: Click here to see Famous Movie Quotes as Charts, from the website Flowingdata.com (January 16, 2014). Note the wide variety of graph types used! This shows that you don’t have to have numerical data […]
As mentioned in a previous post, how you present your analysis is at least as important as the numbers themselves. Using the right graphs is an essential element that helps you tell a story with your data, rather than just report a bunch of numbers. In this older post I talked about market share and […]
