Building a Sankey diagram with Excel : Quite a challenge!

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Let's start this article by admitting one fact. Creating a Sankey Diagram with Excel is hard. Excel is a powerful spreadsheet program developed by Microsoft that allows users to create, edit, and analyze data using a grid of cells arranged in rows and columns. A very powerful tool for structuring data in cells, definitely YES. A super useful software when it comes to generate classic graphs, such as bar charts, line charts, histograms, pie charts and some other exotic types, YES again. But when it comes to generate flow charts, sometimes called flow graphs, alluvial diagrams or sankey diagrams, things get a little tricky, simply because Excel is not made for that purpose. 

Lucky us, there are people on this planet that are incredibly creative, and that found workarounds to generate Sankey Diagram with Excel, despite all the challenges on the way. The funny part is that there are actually many different approaches to do it! In this article, we will surface them, and up to you to choose the method that suits you the best. 

• Some tutorials consist of boycotting Excel, and simply converting your cvs file encoded in Excel into beautiful Sankey diagrams. In my opinion, this is the best way to go, as explained in this article about this alternative to Excel to make a Sankey diagram. SankeyJourney is one of the best tool for that purpose, especially when it comes to visualize your customer journeys on your app or your website. 
• Some other consist of downloading Excel add-ons to build Sankey Charts in the software. The main downside is that it is tricky to find a free solution there. 
• Some other tutorials consist in overlaying many graphs to create one and only Sankey chart. A very sophisticated approach, but that is worth mentionning.

Let's dive into it now!

Option 1 : Convert your Excel file into beautiful Sankey Diagram

Let's start with the easiest.

There are many tools online to build flow charts from a file that you import on a website. 

If your goal is to visualize user journeys on an app or a webiste, SankeyJourney is definitely the way to go. It is free for the vast majority of the use cases, and it works in three steps. 

1. Import your CSV file on the app (link here)
2. Map you data (tell the webapp which column represent user_id, event_name and event_timestamp)
3. Generate automatically the Sankey diagram in seconds. 

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Easy enough, not much else to say about it. What's great with SankeyJourney is that the diagram generated is interactive. It's ideal to dig into the data, which is something impossible to do properly if you use Excel for this purpose. Give a try to this no-code solution!

For other purposes that the one of mapping customer journey and plotting it into a Sankey diagram, many tools exists. You want to display financial statements using Sankey diagrams ? Use SankeyArt! You need flow charts for a more general purpose ? Use SankeyMATIC! You need it for something else ? Check out this list of alternatives to generate Sankey Diagrams. 

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Option 2 : Add-on, add-in or plug-in to create Sankey Diagram on Excel

If option 1 was not the right one for you, fair enough! Let's move on to option 2. 

There are Excel plug-ins or Excel add-ons / add-ins that you can install to make your life easier. 

Paid Excel addons or pluggins for Sankey charts

If you need quality, you often need to pay for it, and Chart Expo is a good enough alternative. Not only they allow you to generate the flows on Excel, but also on Google Sheet and Power BI. Here is a quick overview of their pricing.

To be fully transparent, we have not tried the add-on ourselves (and this article is not a partnership). Us, at SankeyJourney, are more focus on behavioral data analytics (looking at user journeys), which is not a use case Chart Expo covers efficiently. However, their tutorial to make Sankey diagram on Excel using their solution looks pretty good, so you may want to give it a try. 

Free Excel addons or pluggins for Sankey charts

Finding free add-ins to generate a sankey diagram on excel is trickier. We have not found a convincing enough solution online, but if you're motivated, here is a workaround. 

One amazing developer created a solution called Sankey Snip, which is a free add-on to generate Sankey diagram on Google Sheet.

The two problems with this solution is that :

1. Google sheet is not Excel, so we are cheating a little here. 
2. The add-on has been removed from the store by the developer. Lucky us, he was nice enough (shout out for the generosity!) to share all the source code which is open sourced if you want to make your own versions. You will find the github link here. 

If you want to see what to expect from this solution, here is a screenshot of a demo of the tool. 

Option 3 : Get your hands dirty and overlay graphs

This is definitely the most sophisticated answer we found online to the question 'How to generate a Sankey diagram on Excel'. In our opinion, not the easiest way to get things done, but the solution was so creative that it deserved a special mention. 

The tutorial show how to overlap shapes on top of each other until your Sankey Diagram is fully generated. The person behind this idea is quite a genius, as the solution shown provides great flexibility once it's all set up, in the sense that changing the data in your table auomatically updates the graph. 

They made a tutorial video to explain the process step-by-step. Go check it out!

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That wraps it up!
Hopefully, this article was helpful for you. 

We believe Sankey Diagram are definitely an under-used tool and we want to spread the word about how efficient flow charts are for analytics purposes!

If you want to help us in this mission, don't hesitate to talk about SankeyJourney to all your data anlayst friends! Good luck with your awesome projects. 

If you like tutorial listings, you could like this article about the best tutorials to generate Sankey diagrams with Python. 

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