Building Bar Charts

Quick reference

• 00:02 In this video we're going to look at creating a bar
• 00:06 chart to show two different series to help compare them against each other.
• 00:11 Now, remember our primary charting goals here.
• 00:14 Every chart should tell a story as quickly and effectively as possible and we should
• 00:18 get rid of all of the extra elements and noise that will get in the way of
• 00:21 that story, removing as much excess ink as we can as well, where it makes sense.
• 00:26 To create our bar chart, what we're gonna do is we're gonna click somewhere in our
• 00:29 data, and we're gonna go to the Insert tab and we'll say Recommended Charts.
• 00:35 And you'll notice that the clustered bar chart is recommended for us,
• 00:39 so we will grab that and say OK.
• 00:42 Now, it gives us a chart here that is really compressed.
• 00:46 It's not showing all of its different items in this at all.
• 00:50 So, we're gonna need to do a couple things.
• 00:52 First we'll give our chart some context.
• 00:54 We'll select the chart title, we'll say = remember, if you see the = showing
• 00:58 up inside where it says Chart Title, you're actually now editing the text.
• 01:02 So we wanna be able to select the chart title so
• 01:04 it's got its little selection handles around it.
• 01:06 Press = have that show in the formula bar, and
• 01:09 then click our cell to get example A2 and enter to get our total, or title, rather.
• 01:16 Now, the next piece that we want to do is we want to expand our chart, and
• 01:21 by doing that, it will actually allow us to see the individual items
• 01:25 that are associated with the bars.
• 01:28 So in order to get everything,
• 01:29 we need to make it big enough to actually show everything here.
• 01:33 So that's not too bad, we've got all that in place, but you know what,
• 01:36 we've got extra white space between these two series of data.
• 01:39 Maybe we can use that.
• 01:40 So I'll just right-click on this and say Format Data Series.
• 01:45 And what we'll do is we'll grab the gap width, and
• 01:48 we'll set that down to something less.
• 01:50 We don't need to actually have quite that much.
• 01:52 So 72, or if you wanna dial in and get a specific number, we can type it in as 75%.
• 01:57 And that gives us a little bit more room to actually see our bars.
• 02:02 I'll just remove this task pane now.
• 02:06 One of the challenges I've got with this particular
• 02:08 data is it's kind of all over the place.
• 02:09 It's hard to see a trend.
• 02:11 And the reason for that is because it actually plots on the chart and
• 02:14 it plots the last item from your data table first.
• 02:18 So if we go look here, we got Wild Salmon Burger and West Coast Pizza,
• 02:22 those are the first two items that end up on the chart.
• 02:24 So, if we want to control the sort order, maybe we wanna have it sorted by revenue.
• 02:29 What we do is we go to Data and we say Sort, and we'll sort by Revenue,
• 02:35 and let's go with the Largest to Smallest.
• 02:39 No, we'll go Smallest to Largest actually, if we sort the data table smallest to
• 02:42 largest, it shows up on the chart as largest to smallest.
• 02:44 So there we go.
• 02:45 Now, these two lines here represent the revenue, in blue, and the cost, in orange.
• 02:49 So we can that the cost of halibut and chips is way out of
• 02:52 line compared to everything else, especially as a percentage.
• 02:58 The last thing that I might wanna do to this chart,
• 03:00 because there's a lot of values on here, I'm not gonna use data labels.
• 03:03 But I'm not real happy with the format of this,
• 03:05 it doesn't need these extra zeros on it.
• 03:08 So I'm gonna right-click here and say Format Axis.
• 03:12 And you'll notice that once we get into looking at our axis options,
• 03:16 down near the bottom, so we're on this little axis options button here.
• 03:20 Down near the bottom, we can control the number format.
• 03:23 If we click that little box that expands, and
• 03:25 I can actually set this to say, let's not link it to source,
• 03:30 because right now, it's linked to the actual source data here.
• 03:33 So we'll remove this.
• 03:34 And we'll say, you know what?
• 03:36 Instead of using decimal places 2, let's go with decimal places 0, and hit Tab.
• 03:41 And now you can see that that actually changes there, and
• 03:44 it doesn't affect the underlying source data.
• 03:46 And when we're done, we just need to remove the Task pane, make it go and hide.
• 03:51 We can click outside.
• 03:52 And we've got a fairly effective chart that shows what's actually happening here.
• 03:56 Granted the data series are approximated numbers cuz we have to
• 03:59 read between the lines, but at the same time, it shows the general trend for
• 04:03 what we're actually looking for.
• 04:04 And it is linked in and will update when those numbers change.

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