2024 New Year's Resolutions

One of my New Year's resolutions for 2024 is to complete more personal data viz projects, but it looks like the 2,054 adults surveyed in Great Britain had other ideas for theirs!

These are the most common resolutions as reported by Insideout Mastery in one of their articles:

My immediate thought while looking at this is that there are too many bars, making it difficult to focus on the differences between men, women, and the overall population. Plus, in my opinion, using long, slanted labels in a column chart is never a good idea.

To fix these issues, I wanted to create a single (horizontal) bar chart with "error bars" that highlight the difference between men & women for each bar.

The challenge was doing all of this in Excel, since the default error bars wouldn't let me differentiate between male and female:

To solve this, I had to use a combo chart. The bars for the overall values would stay the same, but the "error bars" would be replaced by a scatterplot with straight lines and markers, with each resolution as a separate series. This way I could customize the line and marker colors for each resolution:

I ended up loving the result! It looks great, the message is clear, and you could never tell that it was a real challenge to create.

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*This project is my entry for Makeover Monday Week 4 (2024)