"The Daily Graph" re-creates charts from The Economist's Graphic Detail blog using standard run-of-the-mill Excel techniques without macros. We do try to milk Excel for all it's worth and apply techniques that may not have been intended in the way we use them. In the end, it's the result that counts.

"The Daily Graph" is published whenever we spot an interesting chart on The Economists's blog that looks like it cannot be done in Excel. Typically once or twice a week if we can find the time.The Daily Graph blog comes with a dowloadable version of an Excel workbook so that you can follow what we did... or you can "borrow" our work and use it for something entirely different.

"The Economist" is a trademark of The Economist Newspaper Limited. "Excel" and "Microsoft" are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation". See http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail for more information on the "Graphic Detail" blog from The Economist. All charts on this page and on the blog-pages are entirely made in Excel and not copied from anywhere. We used Excel 2007 until April 2013 and Excel 2010 thereafter.

[May 14, 2013]   Kudos to The Economist: a new color scheme and a chart type that rarely appears on their blog. It's many moons ago that they did a Column-cum-Line chart with additional labels below it and we have never covered it in The Daily Graph....

[May 11, 2013]   The Daily Graph's 50th blog post !  Thank you for your positive feedback. Pyramid charts in Excel are the classic field of action for Bar charts with two horizontal axes. The primary axis covers one side of the bell-shape and the secondary...

[May 8, 2013]   It saves time to re-use charts and only adapt them to new data. That's what The Economist did (they use charts with this design about once per month) and that's what we did*. The pictured data series added a nice twist. Although the chart...

[May 2, 2013]   We based these two XY Scatter cum Bar chart on the HDI chart from early March. The Economist puts a chart in this format on its blog about once a month (also see February 7 and January 10) and not having to start from scratch saves time....

[Apr 26, 2013]   The Economist had map charts and animated charts on its blog all week. Excel versions more recent than XL2003 can't do maps (they are sadly missed) and animation requires macros/VBA which makes it off limits for The Daily Graph. Fortunately, the...

[Apr 17, 2013]   Simple & straightforward charts are often best. So it is with the Bar chart today. We used a similar chart from an earlier post as starting point and got this one done in a few minutes. As so often we use both the primary and secondary...

[Apr 14, 2013]   We didn't like the way The Economist visualized the data today and came up with a better chart. The Bubble chart on the The Economists's blog is fairly meaningless and China becomes nearly invisible because it is represented with a circle instead...

[Apr 11, 2013]   Today's Stacked Column/Line chart* was a struggle. Especially the background -- which is a Column chart itself -- appeared too much for Excel. We were about to throw in the towel but remembered just in time that Excel is a spreadsheet...

[Apr 10, 2013]   It is rare that The Economist puts a chart on its blog that seems to come straight out of Excel but it happens today. Since Stacked Bar charts are so often needed, we decided to re-create it anyway and share it as a clean template for anyone to...

[Apr 5, 2013]   It saves time to re-use charts and only adapt them to new data. That's what The Economist did (they use charts with this design about once per month) and that's what we did*. A difficulty arose with the width of the labels on the right-hand side...