Lego Charts for Excel
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INTRODUCTION
Lego charts are 3D Excel charts apparently made out of LEGO® bricks. Essentially, they are just pretty histograms. Multiple data series can be stacked on top of each other, or placed side by side; data values can be plotted against one axis or two. So far there is nothing here that isnt covered by standard Excel charts (except that the histogram bars appear to be made out of plastic building blocks, not slabs of color). But Lego Charts can go further, in that the data values do not have to be plotted against linear series of buckets. They can be plotted against named places anywhere on a flat surface, as in the left-hand sample on the front cover of the documentation. Furthermore, the size of each data bar (or tower) can be individually varied to convey even more information. For example, the right-hand sample on the front cover shows the utilization figures for a set of servers, and the area of each tower represents the power of that server (the number of CPUs or the total memory, depending on the chart). In effect what you have is the means to plot data that has four or more dimensions, not just the three that Excel limits you to.
Most of the work to create Lego charts is done using a suite of Open Source CAD tools , normally used for designing Lego (and other) parts and models, creating model building instructions, and producing ray-traced images of the results. The tools collectively go under the name of LDraw. Although a lot of tools and steps are involved, it's all glued together in a single Excel macro. The macro takes the raw data, just like any of the built-in Excel charting tools, computes the heights of the towers, then runs the sequence of tools which ultimately writes out the image file. Any text can be layered on top manually with a graphics tool such as PhotoShop or PowerPoint.
INSTALLATION
Download the file LegoCharts.zip to any suitable folder and unzip the contents. The package consists of an Excel template to create the charts, an extensive installation and user guide, and two fully-worked samples. The documentation file will then tell you evrything you need to know to set up and use Lego Charts.
Note that the co-requisite Open Source CAD tools are not included in this package. The Lego Charts documentation has all the details on how to obtain and install them separately.
GETTING STARTED
Do please allow adequate time to work through the guide and learn how to achieve the best results. Although much of the complexity in the graphics processing has been pre-configured and hidden, there is more to producing a Lego Chart than just entering the numbers and pressing the button. Once you are familiar with the steps involved, though, it's easy, it's fun, and it's rewarding!
VERSION HISTORY
Version 3.0 10 July 2011
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First public release
Version 3.1 25 April 2013
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Small change to the template and sample spreadsheets to correctly handly converting the image using version 1.4 of L3P. (The original version of this package used L3P version 1.3. It will now work with either.)
Corresponding documentation change to the section "Configure the POV-Ray tool" on page 7. For users of L3P version 1.4, the include path for POV-Ray should be
+L"C:\LDraw\Apps\LGEO\lg"
(i.e. with the sub-directory "\lg" on the end.) If you are having trouble producing the final image file, please check your setting for this parameter.
Minor tidying-up of some stray formatting in the documentation.
Version 3.2 1 July 2013
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Additional installation instructions for the L3P program.
Minor typographical corrections.
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LEGO® and the LEGO logo are registered trademarks of The Lego Group, which does not sponsor, endorse, or authorize this software package. You can find the official LEGO website at http://www.lego.com.
Download Latest Version
LegoCharts.zip (3.6 MB)
