Office 2010: The Missing Manual

Chapter 19. Creating 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 other words, figuring out a way to tell the story that lies behind your numbers. Excel’s charting tools may be just what you need.

Charts depict data visually, so you can quickly spot overall 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 in a couple of mouse clicks, or painstakingly customize every aspect of a chart’s appearance (including colors, scale, titles, and even 3-D perspective). This chapter takes the first approach and explains how to generate straightforward charts, giving you all the tools you need to move from plain numbers to pretty pictures.

Charting 101

Excel provides a dizzying number of chart types, but they all share a few things. In this section, you’ll learn about basic Excel charting concepts that apply to almost all types of charts; you’ll also create a few basic charts. At the ...