[Solved] Excel Recommended Charts Tool

[moklak]

Hello,

My name is Mark A Oklak. I am an adjunct instructor at IVY Tech Community College - Indiana.
[email protected]

I am currently writing a course about Data Visualization for the college.

In the review of the course, one of the questions/concerns raised was with the Excel Recommended Charts tool. There was some concern that the recommended charts are not always the "best" charts for the datasets to be displayed. I was asked to address this, if possible.

I have done several online searches looking for articles I could link students to that discuss this issue. I have not found any. I was wondering if your site (or any other site/s you know of) has any articles, blog posts, etc., about when the Excel Chart Recommendation Tool may not provide the best recommendation/s.

Thank you for any help/guidance you can provide.

Mark

 

[Yousuf Shovon]

Hello,

My name is Mark A Oklak. I am an adjunct instructor at IVY Tech Community College - Indiana.
[email protected]

I am currently writing a course about Data Visualization for the college.

In the review of the course, one of the questions/concerns raised was with the Excel Recommended Charts tool. There was some concern that the recommended charts are not always the "best" charts for the datasets to be displayed. I was asked to address this, if possible.

I have done several online searches looking for articles I could link students to that discuss this issue. I have not found any. I was wondering if your site (or any other site/s you know of) has any articles, blog posts, etc., about when the Excel Chart Recommendation Tool may not provide the best recommendation/s.

Thank you for any help/guidance you can provide.

Mark

Hello Mark,

Thanks for posting your concern in this community.

Per the description shared, I understand your concern and I am sorry to convey that there is no related ExcelDemy blog explaining the backend mechanism on recommended charts in the Excel app. Although I would like to share an experience I had while working with this tool.

Specifically, I was working on time-based charts to display the capacity variation over time for certain disks, such as those used in Military systems. Excel suggested using a Category chart with days on the X-axis. However, since there were multiple samples per day, a more suitable chart would have been an X-Y scatter chart. This would have allowed for cleaner trend lines to be drawn.

I hope this information helps with your course. Please feel free to reach out if you have any additional questions.

Best Regards,
Yousuf Shovon