Here, we see that sales tend to fall in the middle of the week, but rise on the weekends. But then I wondered whether using column charts provides more useful information for daily sales. I first used the cycle plot for the weekly data. Still another way to show seasonal data is by the day of the week: Because our high-sales months are growing more quickly, this plot shows that sales are becoming more seasonal. This data shows that June’s sales are growing more quickly than those of the other months, and that sales in November and December are growing more slowly. And the fat blue lines show the trend in each month’s sales during the years. The gray horizontal lines show the average sales for each month during those years. The black lines show the trend in performance for each January, each February, and so on for all eleven years. In this Excel chart, we easily can compare the performance of each month of the year. Naomi Robbins, writing in her book, Creating More Effective Graphs, introduces another way to display the same data, using Cycle Plots: But with many years displayed, as above, the swarm of lines becomes meaningless. With only a few years displayed, we could see the typical trends more easily during the year. Rather than showing a continuous trend as in the chart above, we use Excel to plot one data series per year.īut this approach offers little improvement. ( You can download the two workbooks discussed in this article here.)įor example, which months have the most sales? Are sales becoming more seasonal or less so? On average, how much do we sell each June? Which month is growing most quickly? Most slowly?įigure 2 shows another common way to present data like this. This is because the finer details are obscured by the significant seasonality of the sales. With the exception of a dip during the years of the Great Recession, sales seem to be on the rise.Īlthough this chart makes the general pattern obvious, it provides little help in understanding the details of the sales performance. This Excel chart shows the continuous trend in sales over an eleven-year period. If your company’s sales are seasonable, you’ve probably seen a chart that looks something like the first one below.
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