Column Charts

Quick reference

• 00:04 Like bar charts, column charts are good for comparing values to each other.
• 00:09 I prefer to use them, though, when we get multiple series like this, where we've got
• 00:13 May and June and we want to compare the values from the individual product lines.
• 00:17 I prefer a column chart versus a bar chart because it ends up with them standing up,
• 00:21 which makes them look kinda cool.
• 00:23 So we're gonna go grab this data.
• 00:25 We'll go to Insert and
• 00:27 this time we're gonna go grab our column chart, 2D column chart.
• 00:31 And what we end up getting is something that looks like this.
• 00:35 Now this is not ideally the way that I would like to see this.
• 00:39 I'd actually like Tents and Shelters and Apparel and Food group together.
• 00:43 So the first thing that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say, well that was close but
• 00:46 I'm gonna switch the row and column data.
• 00:49 And when I do that it switches these things out so they look good.
• 00:53 So, if your data is about 90 degrees off, just click that switch row column data and
• 00:57 everything will start to look a little bit nicer.
• 01:00 So that's a cool start.
• 01:01 Now, again, there's some other things that I don't like about this though.
• 01:05 I'm happy with the legend down the bottom.
• 01:07 Chart title not so much.
• 01:08 But let's give it a cool chart title.
• 01:10 But this time, I wanna add a twist.
• 01:12 We're gonna say this is gonna be called =Revenue Summary.
• 01:17 But I also wanna add the year, but on a new line.
• 01:19 So here's a secret.
• 01:20 We're gonna say &Char(12),
• 01:24 like the number of months in the year, &"2017 Sales".
• 01:31 Now you can get away with different chart characters as well, these are ASCII
• 01:34 characters, but what I like about this one is it actually shows a little box with
• 01:37 a question mark so you can see that there is something funky in there.
• 01:40 But why do you want that?
• 01:42 Well, check this out, equals grab our chart title and
• 01:47 Enter, and it actually puts in a line break for header, which is pretty cool.
• 01:52 So again, we could base this off of other cells or whatever else which would make it
• 01:55 look good, too, but it's a nice way to get that line break header where we want it.
• 01:59 Pretty nice.
• 02:00 Now, let me see, what else can I do here.
• 02:02 Let's go right click.
• 02:03 We'll add data labels to the blue series and to the orange series.
• 02:08 That looks good.
• 02:09 We can get rid of the data labels here that we don't need any more.
• 02:12 So, let me go click on these grid lines, they're no longer relevant.
• 02:15 We'll get rid of those as well.
• 02:17 And overall, it's actually not a bad looking chart.
• 02:21 Could I do some other things with it?
• 02:23 Sure, I mean, I could make the chart a little bit wider,
• 02:26 that's gonna make it a little bit bigger.
• 02:27 I could go in, say, let's say, format the data series.
• 02:31 Maybe I could make the series overlap.
• 02:34 Let me see, what happens if we go one way, it'll actually put them closer together.
• 02:39 So and actually overlap.
• 02:40 I'm gonna put a small gap in here.
• 02:42 About 11%, but I could also shorten again the gap width and
• 02:45 make these bars a little bit wider.
• 02:47 This gives me the option to grab the data labels.
• 02:50 And if I want I could actually go and say, you know what?
• 02:54 Why don't we go and click on the label options and
• 02:58 this time, we'll force these ones to be inside base.
• 03:03 Now, I'm gonna do the same thing with the other ones because I wanna show a little
• 03:07 bit of a challenge here.
• 03:08 Working with these things, the color doesn't always work.
• 03:10 The nice things about this is that when you're working with these data labels,
• 03:14 they actually can take your pieces from the font tabs.
• 03:17 So you could go and you can set them to white and bold and
• 03:20 actually make them a little bit more presentable if you wanted to do that.
• 03:24 So again every chart gets customized to look the way that you want it to look.
• 03:31 But ultimately you can play around with these things and
• 03:33 really make them look special.
• 03:34 And that's kind of a nice key when working with charts.
• 03:37 So this is a nice dual column chart that should work nicely for
• 03:42 a dashboard as well.
• 03:43 Cuz it gives you once again nice clear columns to show you that
• 03:48 in May the largest value was tents and shelters.
• 03:51 In June it was apparel and then we can actually look at the values and
• 03:54 get exactly how much out of them.
• 03:55 We got a nice title that I'll dynamically update.
• 03:58 This is a pretty clean good chart that I would be really happy to put on
• 04:01 a dashboard.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.