Building Line Charts

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video we're going to focus on line charts.
• 00:08 And where line charts really shine is when you have a series of data points that you
• 00:12 want to compare over time.
• 00:13 That's where the line chart is probably the best chart choice
• 00:16 over all to use in most cases.
• 00:19 And of course,
• 00:19 like all other charts, we're gonna do the standard thing in charting.
• 00:22 And customize them to make look the best way possible.
• 00:26 We'll start of course by clicking our data, going to the insert tab,
• 00:30 clicking on recommended charts and seeing what Microsoft offers us.
• 00:34 And actually give us a lot of really cool looking charts.
• 00:36 But for this one we'll stick with our line and say ok.
• 00:39 Now, of course it creates this helpful chart title.
• 00:44 We're gonna link that back to a cell, C5 here, to get a nice title.
• 00:48 This is Actual Revenue versus Budget.
• 00:51 At this point I think I'm gonna slide the chart down underneath my data.
• 00:54 So that I can take a look in a little bit more detail here.
• 00:57 Maybe make it a little wider.
• 00:59 Now, that it's big enough I can look at it and say, is it answering the question,
• 01:03 is it showing it in the best way possible?
• 01:05 The first thing I notice is my access of dates is starting with January 1st,
• 01:09 February 1st, March 1st and yet I'm trying to plot month ends.
• 01:13 And even within that, it's plotting the day in the middle of that period.
• 01:16 That's a little strange.
• 01:18 So the first thing that I wanna do is give this a better format on my date.
• 01:22 So the easiest way to do that is actually just to customized right in the cells.
• 01:26 So right-click format cells.
• 01:28 And I think I'm gonna write my own custom number format
• 01:32 this ones pretty close to what I want.
• 01:34 But instead of having that dash in there I'm going to go with space or
• 01:40 little apostrophe there.
• 01:41 That looks good Jan 18.
• 01:43 Just to indicate that's not the 18th day of the month.
• 01:46 That's the 18th year of 2000 We'll say okay.
• 01:50 You'll notice that it changes the cells.
• 01:52 It also links right through the chart immediately, which is pretty good.
• 01:56 Now, the next thing I'm not a big fan of,
• 01:57 is that this is plotting in the middle of these columns.
• 02:00 And that's not really cool.
• 02:02 So I'm gonna do this, right click and say format axis.
• 02:08 On the axis options, I have the ability now to scroll down to the bottom and tell
• 02:13 it that I want to plot on tickmarks, and I do this for virtually every date access.
• 02:18 And you'll notice that it actually expands it a little bit wider, and
• 02:21 I now have January plotting on January, February on February, and March on March.
• 02:26 And yet
• 02:26 that's actually still kinda hard to see because these lines are kinda smooth.
• 02:30 So let's grab the line.
• 02:33 It takes us into format data series in the task pane here.
• 02:37 What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click on the little paint bucket.
• 02:40 And you'll notice that in here I have the ability to format the lines.
• 02:44 And also have the ability to format markers.
• 02:48 So in the marker options, I'm gonna chose to use a built in marker.
• 02:53 And just like that, with this circle, I'll end up with,
• 02:57 a nice dot on each data point.
• 02:59 So that's pretty good, let me try this again for
• 03:02 the orange line, grab him, go back to the paint bucket.
• 03:06 To marker and on these marker options, I think I'll even try something different.
• 03:11 I'll go with built in,
• 03:13 maybe we could try a diamond instead just to have something different.
• 03:17 And if you want to,
• 03:18 you could even go in control the borders on these things as well.
• 03:22 So we could put a solid line around this that shows it in say, black.
• 03:27 And now when I click outside,
• 03:29 you'll see that we have little black diamonds on this as well.
• 03:31 Now, there's still some other challenges I might want to change.
• 03:35 Maybe I'm not happy with the format of the axis here, but
• 03:38 I don't want to change the cell formats themselves.
• 03:41 It's no problem.
• 03:42 When the axis actions come up over here I can go down to my number format,
• 03:48 and I can say hey let's knock off my decimals and put in zero.
• 03:52 And that will knock these down while preserving the cell.
• 03:55 So I don't have to format in the cells themselves.
• 03:59 The final thing that bothers me is that the revenue actual,
• 04:02 the blue line, is actually being plotted behind the orange line.
• 04:06 And I think that their actual revenue is the most important.
• 04:09 To fix this, I actually get out of the axis pane here altogether.
• 04:14 What I'm gonna do is go to Chart Tools, and we'll go on to the Design tab and
• 04:18 select data.
• 04:20 The challenge is the first row it's plotted first and
• 04:23 the next one draws on top of it.
• 04:24 So what we need to do is take actual and move it down.
• 04:28 And as soon as we do that, you'll notice that the blue line is not showing in
• 04:33 front and that is a pretty good-looking chart as far as I'm concerned.

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