Creat a chart to show peak usage times for a resource

  • Thread starter Thread starter GillW
  • Start date Start date
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GillW

I'm no genius at Excel (2002 or 2003)and I could really use some help
on the best way to display some data I have.

What it shows is the usage of a training drop-in room, with details of
the arrival time and period spent / per user / per day. There seems
far too much data to put into a chart in any way that I can think of,
but I really would like to be able to illustrate the spread and volume
of clients throughout each day.

Please can anyone give me simplistic information on how best to creat
this as a visual report so that we can easily summarise usage
information?

Any ideas would be appreciated, but I'm not up to creating code!

Thanks,
Gill
 
Hi Gill,

when you are dealing with room usage there are two main parameters
that you are interested in - the Occupancy of the room (i.e. the
number of people in the room compared with the theoretical capacity)
and the Frequency of Use (i.e. the number of hours the room has been
used compared with the possible hours it could be used). Both of these
are expressed as percentages and when multiplied together you get
another parameter - overall Room Utilisation.

As you only have a single room, though, you might not want to go the
formal route - the amount of data you have will be far smaller, but
can nevertheless be quite daunting. You can divide your days up into
hours and then plot the room occupancy across a consolidated day for a
week (or month, whatever period is sutable). So you will have from
9:00am to 5:00pm along the bottom of your graph, split into one-hour
or half-hour intervals, and on the vertical scale you can count the
number of users in each interval. As you indicate a "drop-in" room,
then presumably users can come and go as it suits them, rather than a
group blocking the room for other users which is the case for many
"timetabled" rooms.

If you have recorded the start-time and duration for each user for
each day, then it should be quite straightforward to summarise this
data into time intervals and to count the number of users within each
interval. You need to decide on a few things - is this a one-off, or
do you need to produce graphs periodically (weekly, monthly etc)? Do
you want to display usage over a consolidated day (one graph) or on 5
graphs one for each day? If the latter, should these be consolidated
(so that you build up a picture of "Monday's" usage etc over time), or
renewed each week/month?

More things to think about, but I hope this helps in some way.

Pete
 
Hi Gill,

when you are dealing with room usage there are two main parameters
that you are interested in - the Occupancy of the room (i.e. the
number of people in the room compared with the theoretical capacity)
and the Frequency of Use (i.e. the number of hours the room has been
used compared with the possible hours it could be used). Both of these
are expressed as percentages and when multiplied together you get
another parameter - overall Room Utilisation.

As you only have a single room, though, you might not want to go the
formal route - the amount of data you have will be far smaller, but
can nevertheless be quite daunting. You can divide your days up into
hours and then plot the room occupancy across a consolidated day for a
week (or month, whatever period is sutable). So you will have from
9:00am to 5:00pm along the bottom of your graph, split into one-hour
or half-hour intervals, and on the vertical scale you can count the
number of users in each interval. As you indicate a "drop-in" room,
then presumably users can come and go as it suits them, rather than a
group blocking the room for other users which is the case for many
"timetabled" rooms.

If you have recorded the start-time and duration for each user for
each day, then it should be quite straightforward to summarise this
data into time intervals and to count the number of users within each
interval. You need to decide on a few things - is this a one-off, or
do you need to produce graphs periodically (weekly, monthly etc)? Do
you want to display usage over a consolidated day (one graph) or on 5
graphs one for each day? If the latter, should these be consolidated
(so that you build up a picture of "Monday's" usage etc over time), or
renewed each week/month?

More things to think about, but I hope this helps in some way.

Pete







- Show quoted text -
Click to expand...

Indeed, more food for thought! Thanks for the information &
ideas...I'll take a look at what we can come up with...
 
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