Juan Carlos Méndez-García

This is a short note to talk about Harmonic Averages. Most people are familiar with Weighted Averages, as they are a valuable tool for aggregation. For instance, with the data below, the average profitability (~1735) can be easily calculated using weighted averages.

Avg_Profit = (1000*1200 + 200*300 + 500*2500 + 10*600 + 100*300) / [...]

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Mekko charts are two dimensional graphs that analyze how data is partitioned against two variables, the X and Y axes. The width of the columns is proportional to data represented by the columns. Individual segment height is a percentage of the respective bar total value.

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Two improvements over the technique described by Juice Analytics and posted in Lifehacker: better resolution and solid-looking bars that show better at different font sizes.
If your values are integers in a range 0-9 or so, you can use the REPT formula as presented there, and perhaps you like the dashed type bars, so the formula [...]

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I’ve got a number of questions on the simplified Excel s-curve formula I published some time ago, so here are more details for those interested in the math behind it. The previous posting focused on how business analysts sometimes need to model market adoption, and provided a simple and easy to maintain formula to [...]

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The sites I refer to when I talk about charting, data analysis and good (and bad) charting techniques are normally quite different from the ones where I satisfy my gearhead lust with the news from the latest car models in the market. This time the guys at motortrend did it for me in their [...]

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UPDATE 10/31/2007: Here is a screencast for this model
Often business analysts need to model the adoption of a new product or service for financial planning. There are several approaches, but a common one is the s-curve (see Wikipedia article). Here is a simple implementation in Excel that can be easily added to your [...]

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Martin Theus posts here an example of poor charting or “junk charts”. I’ve had the opportunity to work with many organizations as a management consultant, and it’s sad to report that is more the norm than the exception to see charts like that one in the workplace.
Feeding my bad habit of thinking anytime anytime [...]

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Without being able to show actual graphics from the data I’m working on, due to confidentiality with my employer, this post is a note on a good technique I’ve found that could be helpful to others in the portfolio management space
I’m finding PivotGraphs a powerful tool to visualize and communicate portfolio interactions. One example [...]

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One very common need in almost any industry is to show a given market, its size, the key participant and how all has evolved over the last few years. I have used since a few years a technique I like, and yesterday I read on Juice Analytics’ weblog an article describing basically the same [...]

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On my job I usually have to present data-rich slides that are the result of analysis on sets of data. One of my pet peeves on this types of slides is the omission of the data source. As I always point out to analysts in training, *please* do yourself a favor: put the footnote [...]

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