Produce charts with Microsoft Excel

Once generated, a chart is almost infinitely customisable in terms of its fonts, colours, labels, legends and layout, so there are few situations when an Excel Chart can’t come up with the goods.

The Chart Wizard offers column, line, bar and pie charts, which will be familiar to everybody, plus interesting graphical variants in the form of the doughnut, cylinder, cone, area and pyramid versions. The remaining chart types are specialist ones for use in particular disciplines.

In general, although these look interesting, they are not intelligible to most home users, but will be readily understood by anyone involved in statistics, science or finance.

The wonderful wizard of Excel
Before selecting the data to be charted, it’s worth taking a look at the layout of the worksheet to ensure it’s suitable for charting. The main thing is to ensure that rows and columns are labelled where necessary, and that blank columns or rows are avoided.

If it is inconvenient to move the data and you don’t want the hassle of temporarily deleting blank rows and columns, use the Hide command instead. To hide a row, click any cell on the offending row, then open the Format menu and click Row, followed by Hide.

Columns can be hidden in a similar way using Format, then Column, then Hide. Alternatively, highlight the column or row, right-click on it and select Hide or Unhide.

Yet another way of coping with worksheets containing blank rows and columns is to select the first range of data and then hold down Ctrl while selecting any remaining ranges. The only proviso is that the selections must form a rectangle.

Although selecting ranges in this way is more fiddly than hiding rows or columns, it saves having to unhide them later. When selecting data, be sure to exclude any rows or columns that contain totals because Excel will interpret them as part of the data and try to plot them.