Create an excel burndown chart with “unordered dates” and remaining effort

Question

I'm trying to turn my data into a burndown chart to monitor the progress of my project. The contents of my excel sheet are simplified and look like this:

ID - descr. - story points (SP) - remaining SP - planned remaining SP - date finished

bla1; bla; 20; 100; 100; 01-jan-12
bla2; bla; 20; 80; ""; 02-jan-12
bla3; bla; 15; 65; ""; 01-jan-12 <-- note, date does not have to be ordered logically!
bla4; bla; 30; 35; ""; 12-jan-12
..
..
bla5; bla; 5; 0; 0; 31-feb-12

Basically, I know the start date of a project, and the end date of a project. I know roughly how many effort is needed to get the project done. All the items that need to be done get a timestamp when it's actually done (hence, the order in dates is not gauranteed). And I want to visualize the progress in a burndown chart, where the date start until date end is plotted over X, and the amount of remaining work and the amount of planned remaining work is plotted over Y.

I am unable to get this chart in Excel. I am using 2010, and I'm an average user of office. Who can help me out?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Cheers,

Bas

Answer 1

You should be able to make a chart like this in Excel. It would be fairly simple.

you need your data in two columns with headers above each column. Then hilight those two columns and go to Insert>Linechart.

The example burndown chart on wiki looks like it was made in excel itself here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_down_chart

Hope this helps!