How do I make a burn down chart in Excel?

Question

I have several books I want to finish reading by a certain date. I'd like to track my progress completing these books, so I decided to try making a simple burn down chart. The chart should be able to tell me at a glance whether I'm on track to completing my books by the target date.

I decided to try using Excel 2007 to create a graph showing the burn down. But I'm having some difficulty getting the graphs to work well, so I figured I could ask.

I have the following cells for the target date and pages read, showing when I started (today) and when the target date is (early November):

Date         Pages remaining
7/19/2009    7350
11/3/2009    0

And here's how I plan to fill in my actual data. Additional rows will be added at my leisure:

Date            Pages remaining
7/19/2009       7350
7/21/2009       7300
7/22/2009       7100
7/29/2009       7070
...

I can use Excel to get either of these bits of data onto a single line graph. I'm just having difficulty combining them.

I want to get both sets of data on the same chart, with Pages on the Y axis and Date on X axis. With such a graph, I could easily see my actual read velocity relative to target read velocity, and determine how well on track I am toward my goal.

I have tried several things, but none of the help documentation seems to point me in the right direction. I get the feeling this might be a bit easier if all my data was in 1 big block of data points rather than in 2 separate blocks of data. But since I only have 2 data points for the target data (start and finish), I can't imagine I should need to make up fake data to fill the holes.

The question...

How can I put these two sets of data into a single chart?

Alternatively,

What's a better way to plot my progress toward a goal over time?

Answer 1

Thank you for your answers! They definitely led me on the right track. But none of them completely got me everything I wanted, so here's what I actually ended up doing.

The key piece of information I was missing was that I needed to put the data together in one big block, but I could still leave empty cells in it. Something like this:

  Date         Actual remaining     Desired remaining
7/13/2009            7350                 7350
7/15/2009            7100
7/21/2009            7150
7/23/2009            6600
7/27/2009            6550
8/8/2009             6525
8/16/2009            6200
11/3/2009                                  0

Now I have something Excel is a little better at charting. So long as I set the chart options to "Show empty cells as: Connect data points with line," it ends up looking pretty nice. Using the above test data:

Then I just needed my update macro to insert new rows above the last one to fill in new data whenever I want. My macro looks something like this:

' Find the last cell on the left going down.  This will be the last cell 
' in the "Date" column
Dim left As Range
Set left = Range("A1").End(xlDown)

' Move two columns to the right and select so we have the 3 final cells, 
' including "Date", "Actual remaining", and "Desired remaining"
Dim bottom As Range
Set bottom = Range(left.Cells(1), left.Offset(0, 2))

' Insert a new blank row, and then move up to account for it
bottom.Insert (xlShiftDown)
Set bottom = bottom.Offset(-1)

' We are now sitting on some blank cells very close to the end of the data,
' and are ready to paste in new values for the date and new pages remaining

' (I do this by grabbing some other cells and doing a PasteSpecial into bottom)

Improvement suggestions on that macro are welcome. I just fiddled with it until it worked.

Now I have a pretty chart and I can nerd out all I want with my nerdy books for nerds.

Answer 2

No macros required. Data as below, two columns, dates don't need to be in order. Select range, convert to a Table (Ctrl+T). When data is added to the table, a chart based on the table will automatically include the added data.

Select table, insert a line chart. Right click chart, choose Select Data, click on Blank and Hidden Cells button, choose Interpolate option.

Answer 3

But why would you use excel when you could do it all online and have your boss check your dynamic link.

We are using this new tool since last week. http://www.burndown-charts.com/

What I do is I send my boss the link to my chart and he plays around with the links to see if we will be on time...

http://www.burndown-charts.com/teams/dreamteam/sprints/prototype-x

Answer 4

Why not graph the percentage complete. If you include the last date as a 100% complete value you can force the chart to show the linear trend as well as the actual data. This should give you a reasonable idea of whether you are above or below the line.

I would include a screenshot but not enough rep. Here is a link to one I prepared earlier. Burn Down Chart.

Answer 5

Say your data set is in Columns A and B of the first sheet.

1. On Insert ribbon, pick chart type as "Line with Markers"
2. Right-click on chart, "Select Data...". Select your data in columns without column labels, so your data range would be something like =Sheet1!$A$2:$B$5 .
3. Profit! I mean you're done :-) You might want to change 'Series1' label Excel generates with an actual book name, you can do so in the above "Select Data" dialog.

You can do this with multiple books too - as long as their "pages remaining" data points are tracked on the same dates (eg Book2 data would be in Column C , etc...) Books will be represented by additional series.

Answer 6

I recently published some Excel templates for Scrum, the Product Backlog includes a Release Burndown and the Sprint Backlog includes a Sprint Burndown.

Get them here: http://www.phdesign.com.au/general/excel-templates-for-scrum-product-and-sprint-backlogs