Excel 365 Charts: Easy Excel 365 Essentials, #3

ALSO BY M.L. HUMPHREY

Listing of all books by M.L. Humphrey

Excel 365 Essentials

Excel 365 for Beginners

Intermediate Excel 365

102 Useful Excel 365 Functions

Easy Excel 365 Essentials

Formatting

Conditional Formatting

Charts

Pivot Tables

The IF Functions

LOOKUP Functions

EXCEL 365 CHARTS

EASY EXCEL 365 ESSENTIALS - BOOK 3

M.L. HUMPHREY

CONTENTS

Introduction

Charts – Basics and Types

Charts – Editing and Formatting

Appendix: Basic Terminology Recap

About the Author

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

This book is part of the Easy Excel 365 Essentials series of titles. These are targeted titles that are excerpted from the main Excel 365 Essentials series and are focused on one specific topic.

If you want a more general introduction to Excel, then you should check out the Excel 365 Essentials titles instead. In this case, Intermediate Excel 365 which covers charts as well as a number of other topics, such as pivot tables and conditional formatting.

But if all you want is a book that covers this specific topic, then let’s continue with a discussion of how to create charts in Microsoft Excel.

CHARTS – BASICS AND TYPES

Charts are a great way to visualize data. Sometimes numbers can be overwhelming, but a quick picture based on those numbers makes trends and patterns very clear.

Data Format

First things first, you need to format your data so that Excel can use it to create a chart.

(We’ll talk about pivot tables and pivot charts later. If you work with those the pivot table basically already does this for you and then Excel knows how to build charts off of it, but I wanted to cover charts first before we have that conversation.)

For most chart types you want data labels across the top and data labels down the side, but no grand totals or sub-totals or sub-headers. Like this:

(I usually do not include any sort of label in that top left corner, but just now when I left one there it still worked. Note this is randomly-generated data not real sales data.)

Which data label goes across the top versus down the side will impact the default chart that Excel tries to build when you choose your chart type, but there’s an option to flip those if it’s not how you want it in the chart, so don’t worry too much about that.

If you do happen to have grand totals or labels like I do here with the Total Column, that’s okay, but you’ll want to select only the cells with the data and labels you want to include in your chart.

It is important that you format the data in the table you’re going to use before you create your chart. I will often create charts that include a data table below the chart and when I do that the formatting of those values is directly sourced from the original data table.

So, for example, when I’m going to include a data table below my chart, I format my currency values to not have any decimal places, because it takes up too much space and that level of detail is not necessary.

Create a Chart

To create a chart, select the data you want to use for the chart and then go to the Charts section of the Insert tab and click on the dropdown for the chart type you want.