A picture is worth a thousand words.
- and quite a few numbers too.
But how valuable is a picture of this sort:
Until now such pictures – Sankey diagrams – were worth either a sisyphoic effort:
by piecing them together in a drawing program, only to redo them when the figures change.
Or you could alternatively pay a lot of money for specialised charting or visualisation programs that could do the trick.
MS Excel is unable to create Sankey diagrams – or better 'was unable':
Sankey Helper v2.5 helps you design Sankey diagrams from Excel data ... in Excel !
Advantages:
- Creates Sankey diagrams directly in MSExcel.
- Updated diagrams from changed data in no time.
- Based on the common MSExcel. No additional software necessary.
- Freeware resp. Sankey-ware: Send me a diagram, use it for free.
Disadvantages:
- Adjacent aligning of neighbouring fluxes can vanish when data changes.
- User-assisted naming of data cells necessary
- Ability in handling the standard drawing objects in Excel/MSOffice is required
Sample diagram
The picture above is an example of an elaborate Sankey diagram created with the assistance of Sankey Helper 2.5.
It has a One-step-default-diagram-macro to create simple diagrams straight from Excel tables. The default diagram can look like this:
Sankey Helper 2.5 comes as an Excel Workbook containing Visual Basic macros (VBA) and several examples that show its the versatility.
Included is also a Read me/Manual as PDF document.
Again: Sankey Helper is almost free: Send me one of your diagrams,
use it for free.
Sankey Helper is free software under the GNU Public License .
Download:
Sankey Helper 2.5,
macros and sample data sheets (in an Excel2004 workbook) and 'Read me' document (as PDF file):
Download Sankey Helper 2.5, ZIP-compressed
archive (1892 kB)
What's new in version 2.5?
- Simpler one-step-default-diagram, avoidig the use of polylines, which led to errors with some users
Upcoming: SankeyTurtle
Please check out the idea for the upcoming 'pragramming language' for SankeyHelper, called SankeyTurtle and drop me some comments if you like:
SankeyTurtle Beta description
Miscellaneous
Send diagrams/suggestions/questions/complaints to sankey [at] doka.ch
The pages of the former versions are here: Sankey Helper 2.4; Sankey Helper 2.2; Sankey Helper 2.1
The very basic first version of Sankey Helper (v.1.0) of 1999 is here.
List of similar Sankey software
(free and commercial ones) at the worthwhile Sankey-diagram-blog.
Sankey Helper 2.5 by Gabor Doka, Zurich, Switzerland, © 2004-2016, GPL free software
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