What Is a Chart?

A chart is a visual representation of numeric values. Charts (also known as graphs) have been an integral part of spreadsheets since the early days of Lotus 1-2-3. Charts generated by early spreadsheet products were quite crude but have improved significantly over the years. Excel provides you with the tools to create a wide variety of highly customizable charts.

Displaying data in a well-conceived chart can make your numbers more understandable. Because a chart presents a picture, charts are particularly useful for summarizing a series of numbers and their interrelationships. Making a chart can often help you spot trends and patterns that may otherwise go unnoticed.

Excel provides a dizzying number of different chart types, but they all share a few things. In this section, you'll learn about basic Excel charting concepts that apply to almost all types of charts; you'll also create a few basic charts.

To create a chart, Excel needs to translate your numbers into a graphical representation. The process of drawing numbers on a graph is called plotting. Before you plot your information on a chart, you should make sure your data's laid out properly. Here are some tips:

• Structure your data in a simple grid of rows and columns.
• Don't include blank cells between rows or columns.
• Include titles, if you'd like them to appear in your chart. You can use category titles for each column of data (placed in the first row, atop each column) and an overall chart title (placed just above the category-title row).

If you follow these guidelines, you can expect to create the sort of chart shown in figure below:

This figure shows a table of data and a simple column chart based on Excel's standard chart settings. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done.

How Excel Draw a Chart

A chart is essentially an object that Excel creates upon request. This object consists of one or more data series, displayed graphically. The appearance of the data series depends on the selected chart type.

To create the chart shown in figure above, Excel performs a few straightforward steps. First, it extracts the text for the chart title from cell A1. Next, it examines the range of data (from $4,100 to $6,050) and uses it to set the valueor Y-axisscale. You'll notice that the scale starts at $0, and stretches up to $7,000 in order to give your data a little room to breathe. (You could configure these numbers manually, but Excel automatically makes common-sense guesses like these by looking at the data you're asking it to chart.) After setting the vertical scale, Excel adds the labels along the bottom axis (also known as the X-axis or category axis), and draws the columns of appropriate height.

A key point to keep in mind is that charts are dynamic. In other words, a chart series is linked to the data in your worksheet. If the data changes, the chart is updated automatically to reflect those changes.

Embedded and Standalone Charts

The chart shown in figure above is an embedded chart. As with other drawing objects (such as Shapes or SmartArt), you can move an embedded chart, resize it, change its proportions, adjust its borders, and perform other operations. Using embedded charts enables you to print the chart next to the data that it uses. Embedded charts appear in a worksheet, in a floating box alongside your data. You can move the chart by dragging the box around your worksheet, although depending on where you put it, you may obscure some of your data.

Your other option is to create a standalone chart, which looks the same but occupies an entire worksheet. That means that your chart data and your chart are placed on separate worksheets. When you create standalone chart (chart on separate worksheet), the chart occupies the entire sheet. If you plan to print a chart on a page by itself, standalone chart is often your better choice. If you have many charts to create, you may want to create each one on a separate worksheet (standalone) to avoid cluttering your worksheet. This technique also makes locating a particular chart easier because you can change the names of the worksheet's tabs to provide a description of the chart that it contains.

Usually, you'll use an embedded chart if you want to create printouts that combine both your worksheet data and one or more charts. On the other hand, if you want to print the charts separately, it's more convenient to use standalone charts. That way, you can print an entire workbook at once and have the charts and the data on separate pages.