SOFTWARE SEARCH: Excel-based Graphical Outliner for Mapping Cost Scenarios, Does it Exist?
Just a quick shout out to all you smart people out there. For a cost analysis, I’m trying to build several alternative cost-structures, but preferably in an outliner-like format. I’ll go into what I mean in a second, but if you can think of anything, please comment or send me a mail on techiteasyblog (at) Google Mail.
What I want is a combination of this:
And this:
And what I’d like to do with it is drag & connect different modules together and have it auto-add the end-sum when multiple modules are linked.
Any help appreciated, thanks! I have no reward for you at the moment, except if you’re in the Netherlands or I’m in your country, I’ll take you out for a drink and I will definitely pimp your site in this blog post if you include it with your awesome answer!
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Tags: cost modelling, scenario planning
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I think I understand, but to clarify:
- You have a list of items with associated costs in Excel.
- You want to arrange items hierarchically. Only one layer deep? Multiple layers deep?
- You have a number of possible scenarios, each with a corresponding chart object; you want the worksheet updated as you add and remove children.
Do you need to be able to create a chart from an existing scenario?
Do you want to be able to modify the chart structure by editing the worksheet?
If multiple layers deep, how would this be represented in the worksheet?
- The cost of a parent node is the sum of its child node costs.
What is the reason for wanting to do it this way – to make it easier to compose scenarios, or to have pretty representations of existing scenarios, or something else?
What version of Excel are you using – looks like 2003?
Hi Hugh,
I’m using Excel 2008 on the Mac, though I also regularly use 2007 for Windows.
The reason I think it’s useful is a. the real world doesn’t look like an excel sheet, so it’s easier to grasp a more visual representation of the numbers.
And b. while it’s fairly easy to just create some adjustable variables at the top, it seems a lot more intuitive to just drag modules together and have the end result depicted visually as well.
I will end up giving a presentation on this anyway, so skipping the step of adding the data to Visio or similar would be nice.
[...] GENERATION: what’s your workflow? By Vincent van Wylick, March 16, 2010 I asked yesterday for a more graphical and intuitive way to plan out costs for products and projects. The reason lies [...]