Creating charts in Excel

The spreadsheet program Excel does a good job in creating charts from numeric data. The following are some basic steps to create a chart. (The steps may differ slightly according to the version of Excel you have.)

1. Enter your data into the cells in an Excel spreadsheet and drag over it so that those cells are selected. Click on the chart icon. That will get you into Excel’s Chart Wizard.

2. Chart Wizard is a multi-step process that Excel uses to draw the chart. The first thing to do is select the type of chart that you want it to draw.

3. Chart Wizard will make an initial drawing of your chart. Here you can check to make sure all of your data are included and that the chart is oriented in the correct way.

4. The next step offers you a variety of options in deciding how your chart will look. Each of the file tabs will take you into a window that will allow you make selections about the appearance of different parts of the chart. You should explore all of these options and become very familiar with the things you can do with your chart.

5. In this particular chart, we decided to eliminate the legend because a chart that has only one type of data does not need a legend. The legend function of Chart Wizard allows us to do that.

6. The final step of Chart Wizard asks where we want to put the chart. In this case, we will put it back onto the worksheet.

7. The chart will appear on the worksheet, but it can still be changed. You can do that be double-clicking on various parts of the chart. That will take you back into the Chart Wizard options.

8. Here, for instance, we have eliminated the gray background.

9.In another step, we eliminated the vertical axis. We also reduced the chart horizontally by grabbing the right middle handler and dragging it to the left.

10. When you have manipulated the chart to the point where you are satisfied, the Excel file should be saved with the chart on the spreadsheet. The easiest way to get it into Quark or another page layout program is to click on the chart and copy it into the computer’s clipboard. Then go to your page layout file, draw a picture block and paste the chart into the picture block. You should do most of your text work in the page layout program rather than trying to create much text in the Excel program.