We're now going to focus on charting in Excel.
One of the things that we always want to keep in mind as we're developing charts is
that every chart should tell a story as quickly and effectively as possible.
Every extra chart element can create noise and get in the way of that story.
And it's therefore a best practice to remove as much excess ink or
noise as we can.
So that the reader can actually look at the chart,
get in, get the information that they need, and get out as quickly as possible.
Now, we're gonna start here by charting Old MacDonald's sales.
And to do that we're gonna click inside our data and
we're gonna choose insert Recommended charts.
Microsoft comes back with some recommendations and
while they're not always perfect, they give a good starting point.
Notice that this time,
it's chosen a clustered column chart, which happens to be exactly what we want.
So we're gonna say okay.
And it creates not a bad looking chart.
Now, there are some challenges with it though.
The first one, it's given us a series name for a title, May.
That's not super helpful.
I would like to link this back to the cell A5.
Now, the key for this If you select this box and you press equals, and
if you see the equal sign showing up here, you haven't done this right.
So what you should do is press Escape, click outside the chart and
then try again, one click.
Now, when we press equals, notice that in the formula bar,
we see the equal sign, we can now go select cell A5.
And hit Enter, and it will link the chart title directly to the cell.
So if the cell ever changes it flow right into the chart.
Some other things that I like to do to my charts, I'm not a big fan of all these
labels down the side and all these bars, that's a lot of extra ink.
So instead I'm gonna right-click on my chart here and
I'm choose to add data labels.
And that puts nice precise data labels on the top which removes the need to
approximate based on these bars.
And now that I have these values,
I can select this axis, press the delete key, and it goes away.
I can also click on one of the vertical or horizontal bars here, and
delete those too.
Because they're no longer necessary.
Now, what about these data labels?
I know, I'm gonna right click on them here, and
I'm gonna choose format data labels.
I don't think they really need to be at the top, so I'm gonna change it.
To be inside base and that will put them down near the bottom.
But now they're hard to see.
So, you know what, we'll go to home tab and this is just a font so
we'll change the font to white.
And maybe we'll make it bold and I can even increase the font size by a couple
points to really make them stand out.
But now, these bars they're kinda narrow, so why not do this?
Right click, format data series,
when you do this you're taken into this area where you can change the series.
Degrees overlap, which isn't relevant here,
because we've only got a single series of data.
But we can also change the gap width, and this is the gap between these bars.
So if I reduce this, it should make the bars a little bit wider.
So let's try that, we'll knock this gap right down to, say, 60%.
And just like that, the chart opens up a little bit more, so
I can see more information.
At the end of the day, this is a pretty good chart.
I can now grab it, I can move it around.
If I hold down my alt key when I'm moving it,
I can snap it to the corners of the actual cells.
And I can do the same thing here when I left click.
If I hold down my alt key now when I move it around you can see that it's gonna snap
into grid quite nicely.
And at the end of the day I've got a beautiful chart that will update
when the data changes including the title.