Perhaps the most impressive looking of all the new visualisations in Excel 2016, the 3D data map, was actually an add-in in the 2013 version but is now a fully integrated option. They show your opening balance and the progression through the various stages of trading you may have and then stop at your closing balance. Waterfall charts are great for showing movement from an opening position to a closing position and are therefore ideal for plotting financial data such as cash flow over a period of time.
It shows you the various statistical breakdowns of a group of data such as median values, marking the position of quartiles and also highlighting outliers. If you’re not a statistician you’ll probably not have used one of these. It is also restricted to only two levels so they are much more limited than sunburst charts. Tree maps also show values via hierarchy but unlike sunburst charts, they display the data in boxes instead of concentric circles. Sunburst charts allow you to go to dozens of levels so you can really drill down into your data. The next level will be the customers each sales person has and the total amount they have spent with their respective sales person and the final level would show the products bought by each customer. The chart will plot the sales people at the highest level and size their sections by the sales they have made. A good use for sunburst charts would be to analyse sales of a company and break it down by salesperson, customers and products purchased. Pareto charts go one step further by sorting these frequencies and adding a cumulative percentage line to give you a trend through the data. Although if you want to alter this to show categories you can do that. They’re not based on categories but on values which are allocated into different bins. Histograms show you frequencies, for example how much of one product has sold against another. In fact there have been no new charts in Excel since the ’97 version but 2016 has seen the release of six new charts for you to sink your teeth into. Much like waiting for a bus, new charts in Microsoft take a long time to materialise.