Building Line Charts

Quick reference

• 00:00 In this video, we're gonna look at another type of chart,
• 00:05 and this one is focused very much on charting trends and series over time.
• 00:12 So this is gonna be the line chart, and
• 00:14 that's what line charts are exceptional at.
• 00:16 So, what we're gonna do, is we'll start with our original table of data.
• 00:20 I've selected a cell inside it.
• 00:23 I'm gonna go to Insert > Recommended charts.
• 00:26 You'll notice there's a bunch of different variety of charts that might work but
• 00:29 the line chart is what I'm actually looking for here.
• 00:32 And you'll notice that it's picked up the entire range of data
• 00:35 even though I only selected a single cell, and that's because it's all contiguous.
• 00:39 The dates are highlighted in purple.
• 00:40 They're gonna be on the horizontal axis.
• 00:43 Red is gonna be our legend.
• 00:45 And the blue values you can see showing up over here, but
• 00:48 they also get plotted into the middle.
• 00:50 Now, we wanna make some changes here because
• 00:53 this chart is a little bit hard to read right now.
• 00:55 Everything's really, really small and we'd like to make some changes there for sure.
• 01:00 First thing we'll do is we'll give our chart some context.
• 01:03 Type = and pick up the chart title.
• 01:07 The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna change the size of all these chart
• 01:10 elements to make them a little bit larger, so that I can read them.
• 01:13 So, I'm gonna click on the vertical axis.
• 01:17 We'll go to Home and change the font size to 10.5.
• 01:20 It makes it a bit bigger.
• 01:22 I'll do the same with the dates, and the same with the legend as well.
• 01:29 Perfect, that's a little bit better.
• 01:31 And now I'm gonna play around, now that I can see them, with the number formats.
• 01:34 I'm gonna change this guy out here.
• 01:36 So I'm gonna go to Format Axis, and let me see here.
• 01:40 I'm gonna drag this guy down.
• 01:42 We'll open up Number.
• 01:44 And we'll scroll down a little bit further here.
• 01:47 I'm gonna change this so that it's not showing us general.
• 01:50 This time, let's go with Number and we'll go with 0 decimal places.
• 01:56 Notice it gives me the option for the thousands separator so
• 01:58 that looks quite nice.
• 02:00 I'm also going to grab the dates as well, and
• 02:04 I'm gonna make a small change to this here.
• 02:06 The category's already figured out that this is a date and
• 02:08 it's giving me a specific type here that I can work with.
• 02:12 There's a few different formats that are available here.
• 02:14 But the one that I want isn't there and that's a little bit unfortunate.
• 02:18 So, what I'm gonna do is, I'm going to uncheck this Linked to source box.
• 02:24 I'm gonna overwrite with my own format code.
• 02:28 And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna type in, you can see right now where yyyy,
• 02:32 which is gonna give us a four digit year.
• 02:34 And then mm for a two digit month, dd for a two digit day.
• 02:38 So I'm just gonna make up my own that goes mmm-yy for
• 02:42 a three digit month, two digit year, Add.
• 02:46 And you'll notice that that flips that out quite nicely.
• 02:50 If you have still have your titles on a bit of an angle,
• 02:54 just drag the chart a little bit wider and that'll help fix that out for you.
• 02:59 Now, something else that might be helpful here is to add some markers to this line
• 03:03 cuz right now you can't really tell exactly where all the individual
• 03:08 points are.
• 03:10 So, we'll grab the data series and here we go,
• 03:13 on our bucket we have the ability to use a Marker.
• 03:18 And once we click that, we go into Marker options and
• 03:23 it says None, so we'll change that to Automatic.
• 03:26 And you'll notice that when I click off on something else it's now got dots there
• 03:30 that are showing every time a month changes.
• 03:34 I could put Automatic markers on the orange series as well and
• 03:38 it will actually put those dots in place too.
• 03:40 Another thing I'd like to change here is if you look at these markers,
• 03:44 they seem to be lined up in the middle of these areas, and
• 03:46 I'd really rather have January sorta be flush to the left.
• 03:50 So, to fix that I'm gonna right-click on my horizontal axis.
• 03:55 I'm gonna go to Format Axis.
• 03:57 And under Axis Options, under the little charting icon here, down at the bottom
• 04:03 you'll notice we have to ability to change our Axis Position to show on tic marks.
• 04:08 And when I click this,
• 04:09 everything will show just a little bit to the left and right.
• 04:12 And it loses the whitespace on the end.
• 04:14 So, now when I actually look at this, I can see the tic mark for
• 04:17 January 2013 shows up and the data shows up right above it.
• 04:21 So that makes me a little bit happier with the way that that actually sort of works.

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