The important thing is to delete the chart immediately afterwards. Once it has served its purpose – which is for you to confirm that you are generating sensible results – there is little point in keeping it.
Throwing up a quick / temporary chart of line items as you build them is something we recommend you do regularly – it will help you spot trends and pick up on any discontinuities. Don’t convince yourself that you’ll chart all your detailed calculations at the very end of the build process. No one is ever going to do that. Instead, include charting each time you complete a detailed calculation. Make it something that you do before moving on to the next calculation. That’s going to give you a much stronger visual sense of what’s going on in your financial model.
And because you are building your visual knowledge in layers, you are much more likely to be in a good position to explain more complex charts. For example:
What’s causing the dividends (in the blue) to behave differently from its source revenue (in the red)?
What’s causing this project’s retained cash balance to resemble the Loch Ness monster? Post your answers in the comments section below.
So once you’ve bought into the idea of quick / temporary charts, you then can play around with Excel’s chart features. But would you really want to invest a good amount of time in getting the chart just right if you are almost immediately going to delete the results? I will want to spend time on this when I am designing a dashboard, but while I’m building a model I simply want to decide on something quick: columns or lines? The best tool for the job in Excel is Quick Charts – charts that appear in their own worksheet.
Here’s the process:
- select the calculation line item that you wish to chart
- highlight the cells from start to end;
- press F11
This will generate a chart in a worksheet. And if you have yet to play around with your chart settings then you will see a column chart.
