Building Column Charts

Quick reference

• 00:04 Let's get started with charting in Excel.
• 00:06 But before we, do I just want to call out something that's really important to me is
• 00:11 that every chart you build should tell a story, to convey information quickly and
• 00:16 effectively.
• 00:17 In order to do this,
• 00:18 what I do is I customize every chart to get rid of additional elements and really,
• 00:22 really dial in on the message that I'm trying to send.
• 00:25 So we're going to start with that right now.
• 00:26 I'm going to grab some data here for some animal sales, we're going to go up to our
• 00:31 Insert menu, and at this point, I know which chart I want.
• 00:35 It's this one right here 2d column, but what if you don't?
• 00:38 Well, that's what the Recommended Charts button is all about.
• 00:41 Microsoft provides you with some different recommendations based on your data of what
• 00:45 it thinks might be appropriate.
• 00:47 And you'll notice that the clustered column chart is the top chart here.
• 00:50 So I'm going to go and say, okay, now, it's not a bad job, it looks okay.
• 00:56 But there's a little bit of a problem with the title, it gives me count,
• 00:59 because that's the name of the column.
• 01:01 Well, that's great, but what I really want is the number of animals sold.
• 01:05 Now while the data's all linked to the chart,
• 01:08 I also want to make sure that my title is linked to the chart.
• 01:10 So I'm going to click outside my chart just to be safe,
• 01:14 click on the title, and say equals.
• 01:16 If you see = show up in here we have a problem,
• 01:19 if you see = show up in the formula bar, we're all good, okay?
• 01:23 So, if you do see = in here, press Escape, try again.
• 01:27 Now, I'm going to select the cell, you see it says equals example a5,
• 01:32 when I hit Enter, this chart title is now linked into the chart.
• 01:36 Now the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to take a look at these
• 01:39 bars right here, and I want to add some precision labels to them.
• 01:42 I don't believe you should ever release a column chart without data labels on them.
• 01:46 So we're going to right click, and we're going to choose to Add Data Labels, and
• 01:51 that puts a nice precision across the top.
• 01:53 Now let's be honest, your brain is really good at picking out that beef is
• 01:57 the biggest because the line is the tallest, our brains are awesome at that.
• 02:00 But the second question from your accounting friends is always
• 02:03 going to be yeah, but by how much?
• 02:05 And this gives you the exact precise numbers without having to guess and
• 02:09 infer based on these lines.
• 02:11 Speaking of these lines, I don't think I really need this anymore with this kind of
• 02:15 precision, so I'm going to go and
• 02:17 select the vertical axis and press the Delete key and make it go away.
• 02:21 And now with that gone, I don't really need these lines, so
• 02:25 I'm going to select one of those and click Delete to make that go away as well.
• 02:30 Let's fool around with a little bit of formatting on the data labels here,
• 02:33 I'd actually prefer to see these look a little different.
• 02:35 So I'm going to go right click on them, and
• 02:38 I'm going to choose Format Data Labels.
• 02:40 I'm going to choose to put this inside and which actually brings them inside
• 02:45 the bars, and then I'm going to go to my home tab, and I'm going to choose to make
• 02:50 them bold and set the font to white so that I can see them.
• 02:53 And there we go, we've now got our labels inside the bars and
• 02:57 that looks pretty nice.
• 02:58 Now the next thing that I want to do is I want to actually make these bars a little
• 03:02 bit wider.
• 03:02 Now I'm going to miss this for
• 03:04 a second, because I want you to know how to call this up.
• 03:07 We can select our series, right click and choose to Format Data Series.
• 03:13 And that will actually pop up a pane where we can change things like colors and
• 03:17 fills, but we also get the ability to play with this thing called Gap width.
• 03:21 Series Overlap for reference is only relevant if you have multiple series and
• 03:25 we only have the one type series, so
• 03:27 that's not going to make a difference to us.
• 03:29 But our Gap Width, check this out.
• 03:31 If we go and drag this really, really big and let go, those bars get narrow.
• 03:36 But if we go the other way, let's take it down to about 50% ish,
• 03:39 how about somewhere I can't quite get that precision 54, but
• 03:43 of course I can always change it, so we'll make it 50, there we are.
• 03:46 We now get nice wide bars that are very obvious to see.
• 03:50 So that's a pretty good looking chart that's going to be nice and effective.
• 03:54 It's all linked to the data, so the data gets updated,
• 03:58 everything should update in the chart, I'm happy with that.

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