How to Create Charts in Excel
Introduction
Hello everyone! In this short post, I will talk about how you can create charts in Excel.
Charts are a great way to take in a bunch of numbers and display them in a graphical format. It's easier to understand data when you look at a simple visual than when you look at messy data.
Know What You Want to Show
Before I jump into what you have to do, I wanna tell you that you should not blindly create visuals in the dashboard. You should know what you want to show in your visuals that you create, and they should answer your own statistical questions. Every visual should have a purpose.
Creating a Chart
Okay, now I'll show you how to create a chart. It's quite straightforward because Excel makes it pretty easy.
Here are the steps:
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Click on the "Insert" ribbon.
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Highlight the data that you want to show. Here's an example:
Caption of the image: Note: this data has fake numbers that I used just to play around with.
- After you highlight the data, click on the type of chart that you want by going here:
You can click on each of the icons to see the different kinds of charts that Excel provides.
It's important to understand that using a certain type of chart will not look good depending on your data. For example, pie charts do not work well with large amounts of data because it will get very cluttered and won't be helpful in gaining insights. You must choose a type of visual that will display your data in a way that is easy to understand and is visually appealing.
- You can also change the data that you want within the chart by going to "chart design" and clicking on "Select Data" (note: you must have the chart selected):
This will open a new window that looks like this:
There, you can select a new range of data that you want the chart to show.
Conclusion
That's it for this post! I hope you enjoyed it! You can see that creating charts on Excel is very easy to do. All you gotta do is click on a few buttons and you get a nice looking chart. You just gotta know which buttons to click.
If you're curious about learning what Excel functions are, I highly recommend that you check out my previous Excel post: https://medium.com/@dylanhgs/what-are-excel-functions-227d687251a0.
My next post will be on formatting Excel tables, so stay tuned for that! Thank you for reading and I hope you have a good day!