Bullet Charts are a great way to present information and metrics. This slidedeck provides instructions on how to create Bullet Charts in a spreadsheet after you download the Aculocity Add In for Excel. So if you want to compare performance of a metric e.g. Sales in two periods e.g. this year v’s last year (or target) on a continuum that also shows Poor, Ok and Good performance, a bullet chart could be very useful.

1. HOW TO MAKE BULLET CHARTS
data visualisation tool
Poor Ok Good
Target
Actual
Good Job!

2. Why use bullet charts?
• Want to compare performance of a metric e.g.
Sales in two periods e.g. this year v’s last year
(or target) on a continuum that also shows
Poor, Ok and Good performance
• Quick to read and understand (if familiar with
them) …
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 2200 2400 2600 2800 3000
Product A
Sales YTD v's Last Year

3. How to read Bullet Charts
• The Scale here is ‘000 … hundred thousand
• Product A YTD is 100 (as in €100,000)
• Target (or alternatively last year’s Sales) is represented by thin blue
line.
• The first dark purple shade is Poor Performance
• The next shade (green) is OK performance
• The final shaded area in Red denotes good performance … last year
almost made this mark
• Conclusion … Way off the mark. Needs further examination. Could be
early in the year or else product is not being focused on, or have
competitors come in.
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 2200 2400 2600 2800 3000
'000 Euro
Product A
Sales YTD v's Last Year
Target

4. Step 1
• Download Excel Add on and Install
http://www.aculocity.com/BulletGraph.aspx**
• Outcome – Bullet chart tab in Excel
** The author is not associated with this business and this presentation does not imply an
endorsement for this organisation but the software works!

5. To create bullet chart
• Add a data chart as follows
• Can be linked to data in other sheets
YTD 2012
Sales 100000 268,842.07
Revenue Retailers 80000 259200.00
Revenue Online 20000 9642.07
Cost of Sales 90000 178,629.25
Gross Profit 10000 90,212.82
Owner's Salary / Drawings 0 9,000.00
Total Expenses 25000 96,855.04
Net Profit / Loss -15000 (6,642.22)

6. To create bullet chart cont.
• Click on bullet chart
• Select ADD NEW BULLET GRAPH
• This pop up appears

7. Menu Boxes explained
• Graph Location is taken from the name of your
Tab. No need to worry about it further!
• Not sure what this is called so will refer to it as
‘cell insert dropdown’

8. Menu Boxes explained
• Quantitative Scale Start
– Generally is left at Zero
– But it can be set to negative value … more on this
later!
-500 -400 -300 -200 -100 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000
Net Profit

9. Menu Boxes explained cont.
• Quantitative Scale Tick Interval
– The default is 100
– Decide when you decide on
• Quantitative Scale Ticks
– Default is 10 … ensures a nice scale chart. If goes
beyond 15 the chart gets unmanageable. This chart
has 5 ticks.
• If you multiply the tick interval by the number of
scale ticks you get a number which is the Max of
the Scale. As such if you want the scale to go to
1,0000,000 you have a few options:
– 100000 Tick Interval by 10 Ticks
– 50000 Tick Interval by 20 Ticks
• You can change all these in a minute anyways… 0
600
1200
1800
2400
3000
Bullet Graph

10. • Featured measure … in our case Sales YTD …
this is the one that will be the column. BTW if
the value changes the column changes
automatically.
• Comparative measure .. In our case Sales
Target results in the Target Line. … what fixed
target or benchmark are you comparing to!
Menu Boxes explained cont.
Featured
measure
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 2200 2400 2600 2800 3000
'000 Euro
Product A
Sales YTD v's Last Year
Comparative
Measure

11. Value of Shaded Areas
• The Bullet Chart allows comparison to Poor,
OK and Good Performance which by default
are set at 70%, 71-89%, and 90-100% … these
defaults can be changed … see next slides
Bottom
70%
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 2200 2400 2600 2800 3000
'000 Euro
Product A
Sales YTD v's Last Year
Top 10%

12. To edit the resulting chart
• When you have selected (highlighted) a Bullet
Chart, and click on the BULLET GRAPH Tab the
following menu appearing allowing the
selected Bullet Chart to be edited

13. Button Graph Tab Options
• Adjust Orientation … to change from a
horizontal (bar) to a vertical (column) chart.
• Change the label of the column
(Product A in previous examples)
• Change the font size etc etc
• Change the values of the Shaded Areas …
value of Poor, Ok and Good Performance.
Click on reverse to see what it does!

14. Other Edit functions
• Design allows changes to the Bar Chart .. E.g.
add Colour
• Layout lets you add a Chart Title…. But don’t
put on the legend.
• Format lets you work on Background colours

15. • For my Bullet Chart, I wanted lots of ticks but
still wanted a small chart.
• For this I added another two columns to my
table and used those to create the Bullet
Chart. See table on next slide.
And finally
Featured
measure
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 2200 2400 2600 2800 3000
'000 Euro
Product A
Sales YTD v's Last Year
Comparative
Measure

16. This presentation was uploaded to
Slideshare by Donncha Hughes in
July 2013
donncha@startuphughes.com
www.startuphughes.com