iWork® '09 For Dummies®

Chapter 15. Working with Charts

In This Chapter

• Creating charts

• Using Chart inspector

• Choosing chart types

Some people have no problem looking at a table of numbers that fills an entire page and seeing the patterns right away. For other people, a chart can clarify your data, making it much easier to understand. If you are preparing information for several people to understand, you probably need to present both the raw data and a visual representation in a chart.

The same rules that apply to numeric data apply to visual data: Be clear and don't mislead.

For many people, using charts is a matter of trial and error. You usually start with the data, and then you prepare the chart and try it out on a test subject (yourself, to begin with). Does it clarify things? Does it help you understand? Numbers is a great tool to use for this experimentation because it makes it easy to both create charts and change their attributes.

Note

You can create charts in Keynote and Pages. Those charts are almost as powerful as Numbers charts and they look very much the same. Numbers charts can be pasted into Keynote and Pages documents, and they retain their relationship to your Numbers document where possible, unless you choose to unlink them. You see how to do this later in this chapter.

Creating a Chart

You create a chart in Numbers in two basic ways:

• Start from the chart: Create a chart. Numbers automatically creates an associated table with sample data in it. You can then modify, paste, or retype that data so ...