Building Bar Charts

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video, we're gonna look at another chart type.
• 00:08 This one, we're gonna look at bar charts.
• 00:10 And the difference between a column chart and a bar chart is that the bar chart is
• 00:14 lying horizontally, where the column chart stands upright.
• 00:18 To create a bar chart here, well, lets take a look at our data first.
• 00:21 We've got a bunch of sales items with their revenues and costs.
• 00:24 So lets try and actually build a chart that we can get some insight out of here.
• 00:28 What we're gonna do is we're gonna go to the Insert tab,
• 00:31 and we'll go to Recommended Charts.
• 00:33 And the one that I want is this Clustered Bar chart up here.
• 00:37 So, the difference between a clustered bar chart and
• 00:43 a different bar chart, here, I'm just gonna show you the chart types.
• 00:45 Here, if I look at Bar, the Clustered Bar runs its bar side-by-side.
• 00:50 The Stacked Bar actually takes the two series and runs them across in one,
• 00:54 long series.
• 00:55 So you'd see Revenue and then Cost stacked on top of it.
• 00:57 That's not what I want here, but
• 00:59 it's another really useful bar chart that can be used in certain circumstances.
• 01:04 Now, first thing you'll notice is that I don't have all of my sales items
• 01:07 listed here.
• 01:08 I have got a few, but not all of them.
• 01:09 So the way that we do that and we get all of our data, is we have to actually expand
• 01:13 our chart so that we can see all the different items show up here.
• 01:18 And that might be a little bit overkill what I just did, but if you end up with it
• 01:22 a little bit too short, it starts hiding different items off the series for you.
• 01:26 So that's not ideal.
• 01:30 Some of the things that we may want to do with this.
• 01:33 Again, one of the big things that I always like to do is give context to my chart.
• 01:38 So I'm gonna grab the chart title, type equals.
• 01:40 I will say one of the things that drives me nuts about this is it doesn't actually
• 01:44 show you that it's doing an equals in here, but
• 01:45 it does show it in the formula bar.
• 01:47 And then we can actually click in the cell, and say, enter, and
• 01:50 we'll get our Food Sales listed here.
• 01:53 So, that's good.
• 01:54 Let's go scroll down a little bit and take a look at what we have here.
• 01:57 I'm not sure if I'll be able to get all of this on one screen,
• 02:00 just because there are so many sales items.
• 02:02 And it looks like, it might.
• 02:03 It's just shrinking it down a little bit.
• 02:05 The next thing that I might wanna do is I might wanna
• 02:10 play around with the horizontal axis.
• 02:14 It's got decimal points in there, which really aren't necessary.
• 02:17 So that's because the numbers over here had decimal points, so
• 02:20 it's entirely understandable, but I'd rather not see them here.
• 02:23 So I'm gonna right-click on this, and I'm gonna say Format Axis.
• 02:28 And on the axis,
• 02:29 you'll notice that we have the ability to set the boundaries of the axis,
• 02:34 which would make the range shorter or start a little bit part way through.
• 02:38 I don't really wanna do that.
• 02:40 What I'd like to do is I'd like to actually look down here and
• 02:43 find something like the number.
• 02:47 And unfortunately, I have to keep on scrolling down on the side,
• 02:50 but you'll notice that I actually have the ability to control the number format here.
• 02:54 Currently, it is linked to source,
• 02:56 which means it's reading from the number format over here.
• 02:58 So, if it doesn't matter what's happening on the worksheet,
• 03:01 I could just reformat this and the chart would inherit those properties.
• 03:03 But if the chart needs to be different, then what I would do is I would come in
• 03:08 here and say, let me go and throw this on as an Accounting with no symbols and
• 03:12 I'll knock the decimal places down to 0.
• 03:15 And hit tab, and you'll notice that the chart has now changed for me as well.
• 03:21 Maybe I wanna go and change some other things about this.
• 03:25 I could click on one of these series here, and you'll notice that
• 03:28 the task pane on the right hand side, the Format Data Series, comes up.
• 03:31 So every time you select an element, the task pane on the right changes.
• 03:35 So I'll set my gap width down a little bit.
• 03:38 77%, there we go, so the bars get a little bit bigger.
• 03:42 And I have selected the orange series right now.
• 03:46 I'm going to go and change that.
• 03:49 I can't do it with a right click, though.
• 03:51 But what I can do is I can go to the Home tab and I can change the fill color
• 03:56 to something like a really dark red because that's cost, so
• 03:59 I wanna know what's going on with that particular area.
• 04:04 The other thing that I might wanna do with this chart is I may wanna try and
• 04:08 figure out how to use this to rank my sales items in some kind of an order.
• 04:12 And the way that I do that is that I actually come back to my original
• 04:15 source data.
• 04:16 I'm gonna go to Data, and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna sort it.
• 04:20 But rather than sorting it alphabetically by the product,
• 04:23 what I'll do is I'll actually go and sort it by the revenue.
• 04:27 And I'm gonna sort from smallest to largest, and
• 04:29 this is a little bit weird, okay?
• 04:31 But, when you click OK, it sorts the numbers here from smallest to largest.
• 04:38 In my chart, it sorts them from largest to smallest.
• 04:40 So, it does it exactly backwards.
• 04:42 Okay so, but, the nice piece here is that I can now see the chicken
• 04:45 nachos is by far my highest seller.
• 04:48 I can also see, by the virtue of the fact that my revenues are decreasing but in
• 04:52 this case my cost goes up, my halibut and chips seem to have a very high food cost.
• 04:56 So, we start to get some real good insights out of the visual data that we've
• 05:00 been able to produce.

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