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Learn how to create a line chart, and when it's good to use them.
Example Excel Spreadsheet
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Let's talk about line charts.
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They are fantastic for comparing different items or
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sources of similar data over a period of time.
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Here, we are looking at a spreadsheet with membership data for
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a fictional gym business.
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But, we could also think of this as looking at total revenue for
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different store locations, or profit from different products over a period of time.
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Again, line charts are fantastic for
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comparing different items of similar data over time.
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So let's create a line chart with the gym membership data in front of us.
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First, I'm going to select all the data I wanna chart.
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And then I'm going to use my keyboard shortcut, Alt + N, and
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the line chart short cut is N, so I'll press N again.
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2-D line, correct, and there we are.
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You can see, the line chart allows us to quickly see the story of the gym business,
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because we can see the relative size of different locations to each other.
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And how their membership fluctuates over the course of the year.
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So, I'm going to make this a little bigger.
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And I'm actually going to move this chart to its new sheet.
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I'm gonna call it GymMembers.
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So, for example, the Burnside and
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Southeast locations are the biggest in the network.
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Up here, Southeast is the green line.
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Burnside is this yellow line.
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We see that North 2 started out as the smallest location and
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grew quickly over the year.
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Maybe this is a new location.
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Also, for pretty much all locations,
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the membership declines over the course of the year, which could be normal.
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Lots of people start off the year with their New Years resolutions, and it makes
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sense that we would see higher membership in the beginning of the year as a result.
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This is called seasonality, in business, certain periods of the year are gonna be
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higher demand or make up a larger portion of your revenue for the year.
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Think of retail companies and
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how important the Christmas holidays are to them.
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Or what about an ice cream company?
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We'd expect to see much higher sales in the warm summer months than in the winter.
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Let's get back to the gym business.
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We can see some of the locations are having larger declines than the others.
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Maybe North, which is the gray line,
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is declining because North 2 is taking away some of their members.
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Something known as cannibalization, in business.
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That is taking away from your existing business or
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products by launching new products or locations.
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Let's look at this same chart in column form.
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Yikes, that doesn't make the story clearer at all.
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So using a line chart is preferable when charting
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multiple series of data over time.
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The story is much clearer.
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