Excel Cookbook

Chapter 12. Charts

Charts can make tables of numeric data more accessible and help make it easier to see patterns, relationships, and trends. These features make charts helpful in analyzing data and communicating messages about that data to others.

Excel includes a range of predefined charts, and the recipes in this chapter help you work with them more effectively. Areas covered include the following:

• When to use each chart type and how to insert them based on a table, worksheet range, dynamic named range, or PivotTable

• How to customize charts by adding and formatting elements, dynamically changing titles, customizing data labels, changing legend entries, and more

• How to create bespoke chart types and save them as chart templates

12.1 Using Different Chart Types

Problem

You want to know what types of charts Excel includes and when to use them.

Solution

Excel includes a wide variety of charts, each one designed to serve a particular purpose. Here’s a list of the main ones, organized by category:

Pie charts

Pie charts show the relative size of each value as a percentage of a whole. Excel includes 2-D and 3-D Pie charts and a Doughnut chart—a pie chart with a hole in the middle (see Figure 12-1). There are also Pie of Pie and Bar of Pie charts, which let you show some values on a separate mini-chart; use these to highlight selected values or make smaller percentages more readable (see Recipe 12.12).

Figure 12-1. A 2-D Pie and Doughnut chart

Warning

Pie charts generally ...