Office 2013: The Missing Manual

Chapter 20. Creating Basic Charts

As you become more skilled with Excel, you’ll realize that entering numbers, organizing your layout, and formatting cells aren’t the most important parts of spreadsheet creation. Instead, the real work lies in analyzing your data—in figuring out a way to tell the story that lies behind your numbers. And one of the best ways to do that is with Excel’s charting tools.

Charts depict data visually, so you can quickly spot trends. They’re a fabulous way to help you find the meaning hidden in large amounts of data. You can create many different types of charts in Excel, including pie charts that present polling results, line charts that plot rising or declining assets over time, and three-dimensional area charts that show relationships between environmental conditions in a scientific experiment.

Excel’s charting tools are enormously flexible: You can generate a simple chart with standard options with a couple of mouse clicks, or you can painstakingly customize every aspect of your chart’s appearance (including colors, scale, titles, and even 3-D perspective).

Note

All charts are not created equal. Depending on the chart type you use, the scale you choose, and the data you include, your chart may suggest different conclusions. The true chart artist knows how to craft a chart to emphasize the most important information. As you become more skilled with charts, you’ll acquire these instincts, too.

Charting 101

Excel provides a dizzying number of chart types, but ...