A picture is worth a thousand words.

- and quite a few numbers too.

But how valuable is a picture of this sort:

Sample of a Sankey Diagram by Sankey Helper 2.1

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 display Sankey diagrams -- or better 'was unable'.

Sankey Helper v2.1
helps you design Sankey diagrams from Excel data ... in Excel !

Advantages:

Disadvantages:
  • Adjacent aligning of neighbouring fluxes can vanish when data changes.
  • User-assisted assignment procedure (data-to-shapes) necessary
  • Requires some familiarity in handling the standard drawing objects in Excel/MSOffice

Sample diagram:

The picture above is a direct example of a Sankey diagram created with Sankey Helper 2.1. The defining data table looks like this:

Excel table for the sample above

In the sample picture there are 17 macro-assigned Sankey shapes (lines and arrows).

Sankey Helper 2.1 comes as an Excel Workbook containing Visual Basic macros and 5 examples that hint at the versatility of this little miracle. 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.
 

Download:
Download Sankey Helper 2.1 Sankey Helper 2.1, macros and sample data sheet (in one Excel98 workbook) and 'Read me' document (as PDF file), ZIP-compressed file (264kB)

What's new in version 2.1?

  • The assignment between Sankey shapes and table cells is done in a new way, that - unlike v.2.0 - allows to shift und move cells
  • New toolbar for Sankey macros (inspired by Oliver Cencic of Vienna Technical University)
  • Recalculation of the sheet prompts the Sankey diagram to update
  • New macro for quick creation of a simple Sankey arrow from a single data cell
  • New macro that toggles Sankey lines to Sankey shapes and back
  • New macro to search and replace substrings in shape names
  • Due to the new assignment between shapes and cells, Sankey Helper 2.1 won't be able to process Sankey diagrams created with version 2.0 (If you complain loud enough about this, I might write a filter)

Send diagrams/suggestions/questions/complaints to doka(at)unite.ch

The former version is here, but is not compatible with the new version: Download Sankey Helper 2.0 (218kB ZIP)

The very basic first version of Sankey Helper (v.1.0) is here.

Sankey Helper 2.1 by Gabor Doka, Zurich, Switzerland, 5. November 2004