Response:
Hello! This was written 2012-MAR-07 at 01:42 PM ET.
Use color to add value to your Performance charts. Red and green columns overlay your line chart where red equals an “increase in Response time from previous interval” and green equals “decrease in Response time from previous interval”.
The following excel waterfall chart has the aforementioned conditions applied (red equals an “increase in Response time from previous interval” and green equals “decrease in Response time from previous interval”). In this case, the waterfall chart is showing week-over-week Response time for a landing page. Credit to peltiertech.com for the waterfall template; my additional formatting has been applied.
Document Complete / OnLoad:
_The following is optional reading material._
Suppose you’re an academic site, perhaps a Search Engine or a Reference site. You might theorize the September change in Response time is impact from everyone going ‘back to school’. To further your theory, notice the December change, when everyone is ‘home for the holidays’. What else might you look for? Maybe three ‘reds in a row’, to spot a trend?
Download excel file: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B9n5Sarv4oonSEhDZklWb3RUZWl5LTVlcE1sbUpTdw
Search for the PeltierTech article: http://www.ask.com/web?q=excel+waterfall+chart+peltiertech
# Excel conditional formatting ; Excel conditional charting ; Web Performance Optimization ; Catchpoint ; Keynote ; Gomez ; Excel ; Statistics
Web Tortoise 
Thank you for acknowledging my web site.
You should also know that red and green do not make an optimal color scheme, since something like 8% of males suffer from red-green color vision deficiencies. A color-vision-friendly scheme would be orange and cyan-blue.
Jon Peltier
Comment by Jon Peltier — 2012-Oct-10 @ 10:11 PM EDT
[…] #- Excel: Use color to add value to your Performance charts. […]
Pingback by WebTortoise Year in Review 2012 « Web Tortoise — 2012-Dec-20 @ 03:37 PM EST