Produce charts with Microsoft Excel

In this visual age, charts and graphs are part of the everyday currency of communication. Good ones can express in an instant what might be very difficult to impart using words and tables of figures.

Producing charts the old-fashioned way requires drawing skills and a mathematical bent, plus equal measures of imagination and artistic flair. Fortunately, with the help of computer-based charting tools, anybody can do it well and there’s no need to spend a packet on charting software: it’s all there inside Excel, the spreadsheet module of Microsoft Office.

Many features of Microsoft Office are shared between its constituent applications, so the same charting tool that Excel uses is also available from the Insert menus of Word and Powerpoint.

Nevertheless, there are two strong arguments for preferring Excel when creating charts: one is the obvious saving in time by not having to retype figures that already exist in Excel; the other is that Excel charts can be stored on their own worksheets away from the figures that underlie them.

This makes them easy to manage and print. In Word and Powerpoint they are permanently embedded in the document, where they might not always be welcome or desirable.

Types of chart
Although there are specific tools in Office for creating business diagrams and organisation charts, these are unsuitable for displaying value-based data in a graphical format. The obvious choice is Excel’s Chart option, which is invoked from the Insert menu or via the Chart icon on the standard toolbar.

Selecting either of these starts the Chart Wizard, which offers a choice of 14 standard and 19 customisable chart types ­ and with some of them having up to seven sub-types, there are more than 90 variations in all.