Building Bar Charts

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video, we're gonna look at using a Bar Chart to compare two
• 00:08 different series of information against each other.
• 00:10 And as we do it we're gonna try and make sure that we actually create a nice,
• 00:14 effective chart.
• 00:15 So let's go and see what Microsoft recommends for this.
• 00:18 We'll go to Insert, and we'll choose Recommended Charts.
• 00:23 And just like that, we actually get this nice little chart here that shows us
• 00:27 some bars and it apparently has both cost and revenues.
• 00:30 Now I'm not a big fan of the title, Chart Title.
• 00:33 But that's okay, because we know we can change that.
• 00:35 So I'm gonna say, OK, and I'm gonna go and drop this chart.
• 00:39 And we'll stick it right under the top corner of the cell here, perfect.
• 00:43 Now, the first thing that I wanna fix, this Chart Title.
• 00:46 So I'll click on it once, press =, and link it back to sale A6, and press Enter.
• 00:53 And now I have a much better Chart Title to go with my data.
• 00:56 Now at this point, I'm gonna scroll down to try and
• 00:58 get a little bit more of my data set on screen here.
• 01:01 So we can now see the entire data set that I have.
• 01:04 You'll notice that there's not nearly enough sales items here.
• 01:07 Because the sales item text is large and
• 01:09 the bars are kind of thin, it's not giving me everything.
• 01:13 So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna expand my chart, and
• 01:16 I'm gonna hold down my Alt key to try and snap it to my rows.
• 01:20 And there we go, I should now have all of the different items,
• 01:23 even though it still looks pretty tiny.
• 01:26 Part of the issue that I'm dealing with here,
• 01:27 there's a lot of white space between these bars.
• 01:29 And I'm thinking that I should probably try and
• 01:31 get these to be a little bit thicker.
• 01:33 So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to right click on anyone of these blue bars,
• 01:35 and we're gonna choose Format Data Series.
• 01:39 At this point, you'll notice that I have my series overlap,
• 01:41 my gap width, so I'm gonna go and change the gap width here, and make it about 75%.
• 01:46 And at that point, I get a little bit more color, and I might look at this and
• 01:51 say well, maybe I wanna have a little bit more room on these guys here.
• 01:56 I have two options, I could either go on select the text, and
• 02:00 decrease the sizes, lower than 9.
• 02:03 I'm gonna make it pretty small, or I could actually go and
• 02:06 say, maybe I wanna make my chart just a little bit taller here.
• 02:10 So go on expand a couple more rows,
• 02:12 you can see that it's a little more room to work with.
• 02:16 Now there's a couple more issues with this chart as I'm looking at it,
• 02:20 I'm trying to figure out how to solve them.
• 02:22 Number one, I can't get good insights out of this because it's very, very wavy.
• 02:26 So what I'd like to do is I'd like to try and
• 02:28 sort the top selling items to the top of the chart.
• 02:32 So naturally, your thought would be, well, I can come over to the revenue column, and
• 02:36 I can go and say, Data, and we'll gonna Sort it Z to A.
• 02:40 So the highest values come at the top.
• 02:42 And it might surprise you, but
• 02:44 this is actually exactly opposite what you need to do.
• 02:48 Excel actually starts plotting the first row of data at the bottom of the chart,
• 02:52 and then every row of data, it build it at the top.
• 02:55 So if you actually wanna have this showing up with your bars at the top,
• 02:59 you need to go and Sort A to Z instead.
• 03:01 And that will change it around.
• 03:04 Now on a chart like this I'm not a big fan of using data labels.
• 03:07 There's just way too much information.
• 03:09 So we do need the approximation bars here.
• 03:11 But the question we have to ask is, do we really need all of these decimals on here?
• 03:16 And I don't think we do.
• 03:17 So what we're gonna do instead is we're gonna right-click,
• 03:19 and we're gonna say Format the horizontal Axis.
• 03:23 You'll notice that it takes us into the Axis options, and
• 03:26 when I scroll down to the bottom, I have this collapse here I called Number.
• 03:30 I'm gonna open it up, and then I have to scroll down again.
• 03:33 And you'll notice that I can actually play around with
• 03:36 custom number formatting codes if I want to.
• 03:38 Fortunately this one's easy.
• 03:40 I'm gonna go and just say decimal place is 0,
• 03:42 and at that point when I hit my tab key it actually knocks the 0s off of it.
• 03:48 So now I can close my task pane and the chart that I'm looking at is probably
• 03:52 about as good as I'm gonna get for what I'm dealing with.
• 03:55 But I think it still clearly shows the message that the Chicken Nachos are our
• 03:58 biggest seller, West Coast Pizza the smallest.
• 04:01 And we can see that Halibut and Chips, even though it's not a bad seller,
• 04:05 the cost of this one is really high compared to the margin that we make on it.

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