Creating and Editing Charts and Diagrams

Office ships with a handful of generic charting and diagramming tools. They can come in useful to knock out a quick chart in a standard format, but most power users will find them lacking, rather quickly.

Simple Charts

Last, and quite possibly least, Office's portfolio of graphics tools includes Microsoft Chart. You can access it in Word and PowerPoint by choosing Insert, Picture, Chart. It also appears automatically when you create PowerPoint slides with chart placeholders.

The number one bit of guidance to give you on Chart is: If you have more than just a few numbers, don't use it. Chart is a leftover from the days in which customers typically purchased Word or PowerPoint alone rather than the full ...

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