Step by Step Guide on How to Make a Graph in Excel Plus Free Excel Graph Templates
Understanding how to make a graph in Excel – especially effective graphs that communicate visually your message is very important. This is a requirement for creating any kind of report in business. Management reports and business reports use different types of Excel graphs to summarize and simplify information for the users.
How to Make a Graph in Excel: Excel is known for its amazing interface, very complex but useful tools and the overall flexibility of the software’s features. One of the reasons why its popularity have surged over the years is simply because of the way it can convert raw spreadsheet data into charts and diagrams.
This helped business professionals to visualize important information on a daily basis. This visualized data can then make it easier for them to communicate it with their team and fellow employees. One of the easiest ways you can visualize key important data is by creating a graph in excel. This process is very easy as you can see by looking at the tutorial below. As a beginner it is a useful technique you can know. It will then help you to build upon your excel skills.
How to Make a Graph in Excel
Here is a step by step tutorial for making bar graph with Excel:
Step 1
Enter data into excel or you can upload it into the software. Ensure that your data is well organized.
Step 2
Use your mouse to highlight the selected cells you want to use. Next you are going to go on insert. Click “charts” click on “column” which is going to allow you to choose from the different graphs you want to use.
Step 3
You can then manipulate how you want your graph to look by selecting the different options. If you would like to switch what appears on the x and y axis. Right click on the bar graph, you are then going to click on “select data” and next click “Switch row/column”. You are now finished with the graph but you can experiment and learn a lot of things by just trying out features and functionalities.
If you follow the process above you can be up and running in no time with a simple or complex bar graph. It all depends on how far you want to push your knowledge. To organize the bar graph in ascending order which will allow it to be read and analyzed better. You can highlight all the data you want to sort.
After they are highlighted you can next click on the data button on the top and click on sort. You can now sort the information to your preferences. Sometimes background lines can be very distracting. Especially if you want to communicate your information quickly to a top executives. Who don’t have much time daily to look at specifics. They just want an overview of how your graph look and make quick judgements off what they see.
If you want to remove backgrounds you can easily click on chart layout. Once you click on this – you will go to the gridlines. Now, in order to remove the gridlines just simply choose “no gridlines” – this can be found either on the horizontal or on the vertical options.
Another important tip, if you want just want to use the 3d feature to help visualize your data for style. It’s really unnecessary and could possibly lead to a bit of confusion as to what your information really means. Overall creating graphs in excel is a pretty easy task to do as you can see by looking at the tutorial above.
As complex as Excel is this is probably one of the easiest task a beginner can do in order to get rolling in excel. So hopefully by following the steps above you can kick start your excel journey to mastery.
Take your Excel graphs to the next level! Organize your Excel graphs in executive style report so you can track important metrics for your company, monitor the trends over time and more. Learn more about Excel Dashboard Reporting: