Excel Dashboards and Reports for Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8

Grouping and Bucketing Data

In This Chapter

Making top and bottom displays

Using histograms to track groups

Creating histograms with pivot tables

Highlighting top and bottom values in charts

It’s often helpful to organize your analyses into logical groups of data. Grouping allows you to focus on manageable sets that have key attributes. For example, rather than look at all customers in one giant view, you can analyze customers who buy only one product. Then you can focus attention and resources on those customers who have the potential to buy more products.

The benefit of grouping data is that you can more easily pick out groups that fall outside the norm for your business.

In this chapter, I help you explore some of the techniques you can use to create components that group and bucket data.

Creating Top and Bottom Displays

When you look at the list of Fortune 500 companies, you often look for the top 20 companies. Then perhaps you look at who eked out a spot in the bottom 20 slots. It’s unlikely that you would check to see which company came in at number 251. It’s not ...