Microsoft Details New And Modern Chart Types Added In Office 2016 Preview

Recently, Microsoft delivered an update to Office 2016 Public Preview which included new charts to give you more ways to explore data and tell rich stories across Excel, Word and PowerPoint. Waterfall, Histogram, Pareto, Box & Whisker, Treemap and Sunburst are the new six powerful charts that help you quickly visualize common financial, statistical and hierarchical data. Microsoft today detailed each of them.

Waterfall—visualizing financial statements with ease

With a Waterfall chart, you can quickly illustrate the line items in your financial data and get a clear picture of how each item is impacting your bottom line. The example below shows the income statement for a bookstore. It’s clear to see that the cost of inventory nearly cut net revenue in half while operating costs accounted for an additional third of net revenue. Learn more about the Waterfall chart.

Histogram—exploring and analyzing a distribution

The new Histogram chart can display the distribution of the book prices in inventory so the bookstore owner can ensure inventory can meet the customer’s needs. Commonly used in statistics, a histogram automatically displays the frequencies within a distribution. Learn more about the Histogram chart.

Pareto—finding the largest impact

The Pareto chart will help the bookstore owner to see the most common reasons customers return books. Using the Pareto chart, you can automatically sort the frequency of the most prevalent issues (the bar graph) and then show the additive contributions of each issue as you move along the horizontal axis (the line graph). The Pareto chart allows you to prioritize the improvements you want to make in the bookstore to address the most critical issues. Learn more about the Pareto chart.

Box & Whisker—bringing statistics to distribution

Like the Histogram chart, the Box & Whisker chart shows the distribution of information. For deeper analysis, this chart goes further by providing key insights about the distribution in one view, including range, quartiles, mean and outliers. And you get all of this information with a few clicks. Box & Whisker chart adds a visual angle to Excel’s statistical functionality, creating a simple snapshot view of the data’s characteristics.

Learn more about the Box & Whisker chart.

Treemap—analyzing across hierarchies in one view

The Treemap chart is an ideal visualization for this purpose because it provides a hierarchical view of your data and an easy way to compare different levels of categorization. With Treemap, large datasets with innate groupings can be effectively visualized in a simple way. Treemap draws the big picture, so you can draw comparisons between similar or competing products. Learn more about the Treemap chart.

Sunburst—revealing every level of your hierarchy

While using a Treemap chart is ideal for comparing the relative sizes of groups, the Sunburst chart shows the full hierarchy of the groups to provide deeper analysis capabilities. With a Sunburst chart, it’s easy to see the largest contributing segments within a hierarchy of multiple levels. The visual layout is intuitively natural for finding how each slice is broken down to the most basic contribution. The Sunburst is versatile, displaying any number of levels for any category.

Read more about these charts with examples here.