Welcome to the next section of this Excel 101 course during this section we're going to talk about taking
our simple little spreadsheet here something that's a bunch of numbers and tags and turning it into
something much more graphical.
We're going to talk about charts.
Now I'm going to take you through a couple of different types of charts.
The first one we're going to see right here is the more common type of chart.
A very popular type of chart called the clustered column chart.
Later on we're going to take a look at working with pie charts.
Just really quickly I want to be able to compare and contrast between these two different extremes of
charts.
So first a clustered column perhaps my favorite of all the different charts.
It's a very versatile chart and can handle larger amounts of data.
Take a look.
This is how you create a chart within Microsoft Excel.
So my first step I want to be able to take my little spreadsheet and I'm still using the same sample
file that we've been creating all the way up to this point.
I want to take this and make it more graphical and glance.
The whole purpose here creating a chart of what my users at a glance to be able to relate to the data
and more easily compare Perhaps compared different months to one another or different bills to each
other.
Where did I spend the most.
Which month that I spent in the most.
Well this is simple little bars just with different heights in the bars.
It's going to be much easier to capture and identify that data as opposed to thrown out a bunch of numbers
at my audience.
So my first step I've got to highlight the data that I want to chart so in my case the first go round
I'm going to select from a 3 down to deviate I'm going to get my bills and my three months worth of
bill amounts and that's it.
Once I have that data selected I'm then going to go up to my insert tab top of my screen I'm going to
go about halfway through and I got charts.
I mean I grab the the column chart here and I'm going to get the first one to the clustered column chart
or select that and I've now got this fancy little chart that took those numbers just that raw text in
the background and created something much more impactful and accessible at a glance.
What do you think what is drawing your attention what assumptions can you make here just by looking
at these different bars.
Well right away for me I'm looking at it and thinking holy cow those big blue bars are blowing everything
else away.
What is that.
Oh that's red.
That's right.
That 60 percent of my income going to rent is right.
So it's drawing my attention.
I can see those orange and blue ones.
Well those are pretty low What are those all about.
Well that's my phone and gas.
Well then again at a glance I can start to make these snap judgments and really start to compare information
.
So much more graphical approach to our data.
Now my chart is pretty big and it's covering all my data right now.
So I'm going to move it.
Just left click someplace empty and drag it down below you know places down below my data here.
So now on one worksheet I've got the raw spreadsheet and I've got the chart right there.
And I also want to point out that the data and the chart are connected.
So if something has some idea and it changes and just to illustrate this let's say I changed January
rent from twelve hundred to twenty five hundred.
I don't know why and or whatever but I'll check and make that change in my enter key updates my spreadsheet
but it also updated my charts.
So they are connected to one another very dynamic machines that back.
I'll go back to 12 hundred here in my enter key.
All right.
And back to normal.
So creating a chart really simple just highlight the data that you want to chart.
In this case I grabbed A-3 to deviate insert pick a chart.
Now I want to point out some charts are better suited for larger amounts of data.
Some are better suited for smaller amounts.
So I want you to try this.
You can do a cluster column that's where I'm going to run with here for demonstration purposes.
But if you want to pick something else try it out feel free maybe travel a couple.
Grab your data.
Pick a chart graph of the data again pick a different chart just to compare and contrast and see the
difference on how the charts behave with your data.
Try it out.
Build yourself a simple little chart to really illustrate visually what your data looks like.