Building Line Charts

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video we're going to focus on line charts.
• 00:07 Where line charts really shine is when you have a series of
• 00:10 data points that you want to compare over time, that's where
• 00:13 the line chart is probably the best chart choice to use in a lot of cases.
• 00:18 So, like all the other charts, we wanna make sure that we're able to
• 00:21 build a chart, that we can get in, get our story, and get out as quickly as we can.
• 00:26 So, we want to remove any noise that get in the way of that story.
• 00:29 That's a standard thing in charting, and it applies here as well.
• 00:34 So, let's build our line chart.
• 00:35 We'll select our series of data, including the headers on both the left and the top.
• 00:41 And we'll go to Insert, and we'll go to Recommended Charts.
• 00:44 And you'll notice that the very first chart type to come up is a line chart.
• 00:47 So we'll grab that, we'll say OK.
• 00:49 And it'll build us a nice little line chart, but it's got some challenges here.
• 00:54 Number one, it's got data that seems to be angled.
• 00:56 Well, we can fix that vary easily by opening it up and making it wider.
• 01:03 And yet at the same time, it doesn't look as great,
• 01:05 because it all starts with dates of January 1st.
• 01:08 And if you notice, we're looking at January 31st out here.
• 01:10 So we're gonna wanna fix that.
• 01:12 And one way that we can Is that we can go back and
• 01:15 we can actually change the format on the underlying cells here.
• 01:18 And I'm gonna need to move the chart out of the way so I can select them all.
• 01:21 But if I were to right click on this, and say let's go to format cells.
• 01:28 And we'll go to number and we'll go to date.
• 01:30 If we can get a format that looks like this,
• 01:33 31 of January, maybe that's not exactly what we want.
• 01:38 January 13, there we go.
• 01:40 13 being the year, that's perfect.
• 01:41 If we said okay, you'll notice that it actually updates the chart for us as well.
• 01:46 So that's kinda nice, it's all linked together.
• 01:49 Let's give ourselves some context.
• 01:50 We'll give us a nice chart title.
• 01:52 So equals the actual revenue versus budget and there we are that's nice.
• 01:57 Now, a couple other things that we may want to do with this,
• 02:01 we may want to add some markers to give this a little easier read so
• 02:04 we know where things actually break here.
• 02:07 So, if we select as series.
• 02:09 And let's use the actual series, it's probably the more important one.
• 02:12 And we'll go to Format Data Series.
• 02:16 We'll go to the Effects button here.
• 02:19 Nope, nothing on there that we wanna to look at.
• 02:22 Let's go to the Fill Bucket, aha, we have Line, we have Marker.
• 02:27 If we click on Marker,
• 02:28 we can say, let's have some automatic markers that show up on our line series.
• 02:34 Now when I click out,
• 02:34 you can see that we have little dots that show us where they belong.
• 02:38 Something else that I like to do with these things here is, also,
• 02:42 change the horizontal axis here, and where things are actually plotted.
• 02:47 So when I select that, If I scroll all the way down here,
• 02:52 you'll notice that I have the ability to change the axis position.
• 02:56 I'm just going to move the chart over a bit so
• 02:58 you can see a little bit more what happens with this because when I select that and
• 03:03 I go back into the axis options and Axis Options.
• 03:09 We scroll down, actually I will now change it to plot on tick marks,
• 03:15 and watch what happens to the lines.
• 03:17 They actually flush out so they meet the sides of the chart, and
• 03:20 to me that looks a little bit better,
• 03:21 because I don't really wanna plot January 31st as the end of the month.
• 03:25 I really want January 31st to be the first piece of data that's on here.
• 03:29 So now I can go back, I can say let's make some other changes.
• 03:32 Maybe I wanna go in and change my marker this time here for my orange series.
• 03:38 I'll select a marker that uses a, how about a built in type?
• 03:43 And we'll go, instead of using the round circles we'll go with little diamonds, so
• 03:47 we can change the shape and size so that they look pretty good as well.
• 03:53 The last thing that I might wanna do here is, I'm looking at the series here, and
• 03:58 I'm seeing that my actual is showing behind my budget.
• 04:02 And really, actual is probably the thing that's more important to me, so
• 04:05 I'd kinda like to bring this out front.
• 04:08 So to do that, what I'm gonna do is, I'm actually gonna click outside the chart,
• 04:11 we'll select the whole chart again.
• 04:13 We need to get off the individual series.
• 04:15 And we're going to go to the chart tools and we're going to go to design and
• 04:20 select data.
• 04:23 These chart series plot in order, so
• 04:26 it puts revenue actual on first, and then it draws revenue budget on top of it.
• 04:31 So I'm going to drag revenue budget I'm gonna move it up and
• 04:34 say plot revenue budget first.
• 04:36 And what you can see is that the blue line has now popped in front of the orange one.
• 04:40 So when I click OK, that looks a little bit better to me because now
• 04:44 the actual is the more foremost piece of this equation.
• 04:47 So that's how we go about building an effective line chart.

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