Edward Tufte's slopegraphs in Excel

This webpage by Roberto Mensa and Krisztina Szabó, provides step-by-step guidance on producing slopegraphs in Excel.

Each step of the process is exlpained in detailed and includes screen shots to support its use.

Excerpt

"One of the strengths of Tufte's graph (perhaps the most important) is that we can immediately read the ranking of both the data. Another of the strengths is that with this chart we provide a lot of information using very little ink and colors - in a really clear structure.

Both of these points are problematic if you want to replicate Tufte's graph with a dynamic chart in Excel. Peltier Tech in his Slope Graphs tutorial proposed a chart using line chart type, but both of the features are missing from his solution.

In this post we would like to share with you how we created slopegraphs in Excel solving the above mentioned two challenges:

• We managed to build up two column of labels on the left and right of the chart.
• Only one data series were used for the slopes, so the solution is fully dynamic (you can add new rows and columns too), while all the slopes has the same color."