Hi, Jason Morrell here.
There's a type of chart available in Excel called the Radar Chart.
It's been around for quite a while.
Not many people use it, but it's very good for showing anomalies or outliers in your
data.
It does this by plotting a shape and any irregularities in the shape will show you where these outliers
or anomalies are.
Here's a demonstration.
in this example, we have a fairly large table showing the monthly rainfall between 2000
and 2017, month by month.
So I'm first going to choose all the cells across the top for the years.
They will be the labels on my radar chart.
I'm also going to hold CTRL and click the latest information.
So CTRL lets you select two non adjacent ranges, that's two ranges that aren't next to each
other, for use for our chart.
I then go to 'Insert' at the top, go to my Charts Gallery here and find the Radar Chart.
There's a few different options.
I'm going to stick with the basic one to start with.
And also to see more detail.
I'm going to move it to its own chart by going to Chart Tools, Design tab, going to Move
Chart on the right hand side and put it on a brand new sheet.
So let's call that Radar.
At the moment the chart is configured the wrong way round, so I'm going to go across
to Switch Row and Column and it transformed into a proper radar chart.
The reason it didn't give you the right chart initially was because normally we select data
that goes in columns, whereas we chose two rows within the table, so we just switched
it around to swap the rows and the columns on the chart.
Now if you look, you've got concentric circles starting with a lower values in the middle
through the highest values on the outside.
The idea of a radar chart is that if your data falls into the natural range of data
that you normally expect, you get a regular shape on your radar chart.
So I most of the stuff here falls between about a hundred and a hundred and fifty all
the way round except for this anomaly that we put in here, this little data point here
is 250 which is way out of the normal range.
So as you can see, it spikes out.
it would show the same thing if you had a really low value, like if one particular month
you had, say, 10 millimeters, you'll come right down to the center of the diagram here
and kind of spikes right in and again you could spot it pretty quickly because it disfigures
the normal shape you'd expect to see.
At the top here under Chart Tools Design, hover over any of these, we can click on a
design to keep it and that's just a quick way to get different designs, different color
schemes, different layouts and other options.
For this particular chart, to finish it off, you'd probably set the Chart Title to something
descriptive, so if you just click in there and rename it.
So this will be December Rainfall Between 2000 and 2017.
The Legend here, OK, there's only one series of data so there's no real point to having
the legend here.
If you assign two months with of data, say November and December for all those years,
you'd have two series here in two different colored shapes on your radar, that'd be worth
keeping the legend for.
In this particular case, I'm going to click on the chart, go to my plus sign that shows
all the Chart Elements and switch off the legend.
It's serving no purpose on this particular chart.
The other thing I might want to do here is to add the actual data on each data point.
You can see the years going around the wheel around the edge here from 2000 through to
2017, but it may be worth including that information, at least the values, on the shape itself.
So under Data Labels, if I click the arrow and choose More Options, this gives me a side
panel and straight away you can see the values next to each of the data points on your radar.
You may, on occasion also want to include Category Name, so in this case that would
show the year and the value.
In this case, I think because you've got to round the edge, less clutter is better, so
I'll probably switch that off in this instance.
Let's do one quick example where we add another month.
If we go to Chart Tools, Design tab, and select the data, it throws us back to the original
sheet and shows us the data that's already selected.
It also gives you this box here and you can use the box here if you want to add extra
ranges in, but the easiest way I find is to just go straight back to the data and select
the extra data that you need.
So you've got your first two already.
I'm going to hold down CTRL again.
Maybe I'll choose something mid-year, so if I choose this range as well, right through
to the last year.
It's called Series 1 and Series 2.
So if you want to modify those, you just choose Edit here and each of those series you can
name.
So the B9 through to SS9, that'll be June.
This one here.
I'm going to edit that, and that's December.
Click OK, take a look at your chart and if we just quickly turn the Legend on, because
we turned it off before.
Go to the plus sign, tick on the Legend, you can reposition it if you want to, but the
important bit is the two shapes on your radar, because we had the Data Labels on, it's now
too much clutter really in the middle of the chart.
So in this instance I'd undo the Data Labels, just to simplify that as well.
So that's the Radar Chart and like I say, it's very good for spotting anomalies.
As long as you have regular data you should have regular shapes, and that's the idea,
but if there's something that doesn't fit the normal range, it'll will spike out or
spike out, but you'll spot it.
That's all there is to it.
My name is Jason Morrell.
Thanks for watching.