Charts in Excel
People love a chart and more and more you will be asked to show your data with a chart. Data Visualisation is a whole big thing in itself but if you new to charts, here are some guidelines.
- If you have a large amount of data (over 100 rows), you are probably better off summarizing the data with a pivot table and then doing a chart from that.
- The key thing with smaller quantities of data is to invoke the spirit of Judge Judy (“the data, only the data and nothing but the data”). Make sure you only highlight what you want to include
- There are many many types of chart. In my experience, people tend to yearn for the pie chart. Alas, there are actually only a few scenarios where a pie chart is a good fit. This is why I strongly recommend using the Recommended charts option in Excel (available in Excel 2013 and later). It solves that problem for you
As always here is the file for you to practise on.
In this video I will show you the following:
- How to create a chart using Recommended Charts
- How to edit some of the individual elements
- How to change the style and colouring
- What to do if you only want to graph some of the data?
- What do you do if you have to add more data?
- Two shortcuts you can use are (and in both cases you need to have the data highlighted) : F11 creates an instant chart on a new sheet. Alt and F1 creates an instant chart on the same page.