In reading a recent Excel charting post, I got that Yogi Berra feeling, “..this is deja vu all over again”. I could have sworn that I had made or seen a similar chart several years ago. This post looks into the deja vu mystery and reports on my findings. You’ll have to read this post to see if Yogi’s quote applies to Excel charts.
Recent Excel Chart Posts
On April 13, 2009, Jon Peltier wrote a post on replacing a radial chart with a line chart using oil price trends. The topic looked familiar, I got a mild deja vu feeling. A few days later, Jon wrote a 2nd post explaining how he used error bars as leader lines to connect his notes to the data points on his trend line. Well this really got my deja vu feeling going.
What was it? Where had I seen this topic before? I had to find out. I checked a few places, then I remembered my own website, ProcessTrends.Com. Could it be that I had done something similar? I checked my What’s New page. I scrolled down the list until 5/1/06. Yes. There it was!
Previous Post on Same Topic
It turns out that on May 1, 2006, I posted Trend Charts with Events and used crude oil price data trends and error bars to connect my events to the cost points. Here’s my 5/1/06 chart.
Jon and I both used Excel error bars on similar data. My data was crude oil, in $2004 while Jon used current $. No wonder I had that deja vu feeling.
While I’m not sure what this tells us about how much progress the Excel charting community has made in the last 3 years, at least I now know what Yogi was talking about. Deja vu is alive in the Excel chart world.
You can still download my original Trend Chart with events workbook here.
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What I believe this means is that Excel as far as charting is concerned hasn’t progressed in probably 5 years. I would love to see the Excel MVPs sit down with the Office team and show them some R examples. Point to it and say – “we want that”. In addition they can bring F4 functionality back as well as make all chart elements exposed to VBA. Its a travesty that charting hasn’t progressed past – let’s make it look prettier for 2007.
Nothing new under the sun. No new topics either, apparently.