Let's get started with charting in Excel.
But before we, do I just want to call out something that's really important to me is
that every chart you build should tell a story, to convey information quickly and
effectively.
In order to do this,
what I do is I customize every chart to get rid of additional elements and really,
really dial in on the message that I'm trying to send.
So we're going to start with that right now.
I'm going to grab some data here for some animal sales, we're going to go up to our
Insert menu, and at this point, I know which chart I want.
It's this one right here 2d column, but what if you don't?
Well, that's what the Recommended Charts button is all about.
Microsoft provides you with some different recommendations based on your data of what
it thinks might be appropriate.
And you'll notice that the clustered column chart is the top chart here.
So I'm going to go and say, okay, now, it's not a bad job, it looks okay.
But there's a little bit of a problem with the title, it gives me count,
because that's the name of the column.
Well, that's great, but what I really want is the number of animals sold.
Now while the data's all linked to the chart,
I also want to make sure that my title is linked to the chart.
So I'm going to click outside my chart just to be safe,
click on the title, and say equals.
If you see = show up in here we have a problem,
if you see = show up in the formula bar, we're all good, okay?
So, if you do see = in here, press Escape, try again.
Now, I'm going to select the cell, you see it says equals example a5,
when I hit Enter, this chart title is now linked into the chart.
Now the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to take a look at these
bars right here, and I want to add some precision labels to them.
I don't believe you should ever release a column chart without data labels on them.
So we're going to right click, and we're going to choose to Add Data Labels, and
that puts a nice precision across the top.
Now let's be honest, your brain is really good at picking out that beef is
the biggest because the line is the tallest, our brains are awesome at that.
But the second question from your accounting friends is always
going to be yeah, but by how much?
And this gives you the exact precise numbers without having to guess and
infer based on these lines.
Speaking of these lines, I don't think I really need this anymore with this kind of
precision, so I'm going to go and
select the vertical axis and press the Delete key and make it go away.
And now with that gone, I don't really need these lines, so
I'm going to select one of those and click Delete to make that go away as well.
Let's fool around with a little bit of formatting on the data labels here,
I'd actually prefer to see these look a little different.
So I'm going to go right click on them, and
I'm going to choose Format Data Labels.
I'm going to choose to put this inside and which actually brings them inside
the bars, and then I'm going to go to my home tab, and I'm going to choose to make
them bold and set the font to white so that I can see them.
And there we go, we've now got our labels inside the bars and
that looks pretty nice.
Now the next thing that I want to do is I want to actually make these bars a little
bit wider.
Now I'm going to miss this for
a second, because I want you to know how to call this up.
We can select our series, right click and choose to Format Data Series.
And that will actually pop up a pane where we can change things like colors and
fills, but we also get the ability to play with this thing called Gap width.
Series Overlap for reference is only relevant if you have multiple series and
we only have the one type series, so
that's not going to make a difference to us.
But our Gap Width, check this out.
If we go and drag this really, really big and let go, those bars get narrow.
But if we go the other way, let's take it down to about 50% ish,
how about somewhere I can't quite get that precision 54, but
of course I can always change it, so we'll make it 50, there we are.
We now get nice wide bars that are very obvious to see.
So that's a pretty good looking chart that's going to be nice and effective.
It's all linked to the data, so the data gets updated,
everything should update in the chart, I'm happy with that.