Excel can be a powerful tool for data analysis, but it can be difficult to create custom charts that meet your specific needs. In this article, we’ll show you how to create custom charts in Excel using the data analysis tools available in the software. First, let’s look at some of the basic chart types that are available in Excel. There are three main types of charts: line charts, bar charts, and pie charts. Each has its own set of features and advantages that can help you make better decisions about your data. Line Charts A line chart is a simple type of chart that shows how different variables change over time. You can use a line chart to track changes in sales volumes, customer churn rates, or any other variable that you want to measure over time. Line charts are easy to understand and can be a useful way to visualize your data. To create a line chart in Excel, first select the data you want to include in the chart. Next, click on the Chart tab on the ribbon and select Line Chart from the list of options. (If you don’t see Line Chart on the ribbon, click on Data > Charts > Line Chart.) Next, specify the type of line chart you want to create (linear or logarithmic), and then select the range of values for which you want to plot your data. Finally, specify whether you want your lines to be smooth or not (smooth lines make graphs more visually appealing but may not be as accurate). Click OKto finish creating your chart. Plotting Data with a Bar Chart A bar chart is similar to a line graph but shows variations in data grouped by category instead of by time period. For example, you might use a bar chart to show how many new customers were acquired each month over the past year or how much revenue each ..
The world today has way too much data, but very little information. In today’s article we will show you how to extract information from your spreadsheet’s data and present them in custom charts.
Here at How-To Geek we’re always working really hard to produce great articles for our readers, and so we keep an eye on the number of articles and pageviews for each month. For example, here’s a list of the top 10 articles for October:
We’re assuming that you’ve got some background with Microsoft Excel and how to use charts, but if you need a primer be sure and check out our article covering how to create charts in Excel.
Custom Charts in Excel
Our Chief Geek likes to keep a close watch on how well his writers perform, so to show him how productive we are, we prepared some excel charts courtesy of Juice Analytics.
Juice Analytics gives a wide range of custom, ready-to-use Excel charts that we can download as an Excel spreadsheet or as a Powerpoint slide.
The Excel spreadsheet comes with two components, the chart data and the chart itself, that we can modify to suit our needs.
The template itself is quite easy to work with—we just have to key in our monthly page views data into the “chart data” section and the chart will automatically update itself to display our data.
This is how the spreadsheet looks after we key in the page view data and put a little bit of cosmetic formatting to make the table look prettier. The chart definitely shows how productive the writers have been the past 2 months.
We chose a different type of column chart to give a report of our daily page views, called the stacked column chart—it is basically the same chart, except it stacks the charts on top of one another and sums the data to give a better picture of how many page views each author’s article gets on a day-to-day basis.
We start keying in the author’s name, dates, and page views into the chart data section…
We’re also adding a total of the daily page views using the standard “sum” function.
The “sum” function aggregates each writer’s page views under the “Total” column.
Our newer articles have been steadily gaining attention for the past 5 days and hopefully for the rest of this month.
These two charts are not the only charts that we can create. Juice Analytics has a lot of different custom charts that we can use to present our data.
We can see our Chief Geek smiling when he sees that we have been working hard producing better articles for How-To Geek.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can use Excel, be sure and check out some of our other articles about using data in our spreadsheets:
Using online data for Excel 2010 Import Access Database for Excel Using Sparklines in Excel 2010
Do you have any other tips for your fellow readers who might be trying to use charts? Share them in the comments.
