Charts: Choosing, Building and Correcting a Chart
Choosing the chart
Charts turn numbers into a picture. Column or bar charts compare categories, line charts show a trend over time, pie charts show parts of one whole using a single data series, and scatter (XY) charts show the relationship between two numeric variables. Select the data, including headings, before inserting, and check whether the first row or column holds series names or category labels.
Chart anatomy
Know the parts: chart title, axis titles, category axis, value axis, legend, data labels, gridlines, plot area and series. Each can be added, removed or repositioned. A chart can sit on the worksheet or on its own chart sheet, and can be moved and resized by dragging its border.
Traps
- A pie chart built from several series or from negative values is meaningless; use a column chart instead.
- Including a totals row in the source range distorts the whole chart.
- Rows added beyond the original source range are not charted unless the range is extended.
- Formatting one data point (a single column) is easy to confuse with formatting the entire series.
- Categories appearing on the wrong axis are fixed with Switch Row/Column.
Rule of thumb
Build the chart from a clean range with one header row and one header column, no totals and no blank rows. If the picture looks wrong, check the source range first, then use Switch Row/Column before editing anything else.
Worked example
Monthly sales in column A with values in column B produce a line chart by selecting A1:B13 and choosing Line; adding March data in row 14 requires dragging the source range down to B14 to include it.