Power-user lets you create Mekko charts in Excel. Mekko charts (also known as Marimekko or market cap charts), are one of the most effective chart types you can use in a presentation. It is often used to segment a market or company activity by customers, players, products or distribution channels, and is very popular among strategy consultants as a powerful tool for analyzing data.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• About Mekko charts
• Creating a Mekko chart with Power-user
• Editing and customizing a Mekko
  • Chart Options
  • Series Options

About Mekko charts

Instead of using multiple bar charts, a Marimekko will show at the same time the relative weight of one dimension (e.g. products) for each segment (e.g. channel), while allowing at the same time to see the relative weight of each segment compared to one another.

Look at the Mekko chart above. It shows a lot of information on a single chart:

• The US is the biggest market (240m, or 24% of the total), closely followed by China (237m, or 23% of the total). 
• Product D is the most-selling market (28% of the total), followed by product A (26%) and product E (23%), while product B and C are much less important (9% and 15% respectively). 
• The largest market segments are for product A in the US (92m), and for product D in China.
• Although product C does not have a big share of the total market, it is still the most sold in Germany.
• ...

The more you look at a Mekko chart, the more you will deduct interesting information about market opportunities and dynamics, about companies respective strategies and positioning, etc.

Creating a Mekko chart with Power-user

Currently, Mekko charts can only be created from the Excel ribbon of Power-user. 

• From Excel, click Create Mekko chart.
• A dialog box will open, asking you to select the data source.
• Select your data, including the row and column headers, and click OK to validate. The chart will be created automatically.

Your data should be organized in a basic table of rows and columns. If you show Countries in rows and Products in columns,   then the Mekko will have Countries in rows and Products in columns, just like in the above example.

Editing and customizing a Mekko

When you create a Mekko, an edition pane will automatically show up on the right of your screen. At any time, you can open this edition pane by right-clicking the chart and choosing Edit Mekko chart.

Chart Options

By default the edition pane opens on the Chart Options tab. From this tab, you can easily:

• Add, remove or edit the title of your chart.
• Edit the color for the borders of the Mekko.
• Hide or show totals for Series, Categories, Labels or the overall chart, as values and/or as percentages.
• Change the number format with a specific number of decimals for either values and/or percentages. 

The chart labels will automatically be formatted the same way as the cells in your data source. So if you wish to edit the format of your labels, you can just format the source and update the chart.

Series Options

To edit the format of a specific Series on your chart, click the second tab, Series Options. From this menu you can select a specific Series from your chart, and then:

• Change the fill color for this Series only.
• Change the color, font size etc. of the labels for that data Series.