How to Make a Bar Chart in Excel

Whether you are gathering data for a high school term paper or a boardroom presentation, it’s important to have a clean, concise way of presenting your findings. Tables of raw data may be informational, but they generally don’t convey the same level of understanding as properly constructed charts and graphs. One type of chart that gives a lot of visual information with a short glance is a bar chart. With Microsoft Excel, constructing a bar chart is as easy as clicking a few buttons with your mouse. Simply supply the data, choose a few basic options and you’ll have an eye-pleasing bar chart in no time.

Things You'll Need

• Microsoft Excel

Instructions

1. 

   Open the Excel file that contains your data. If you have not created a file with your data yet, open a new Excel workbook and do that now. In this example, there is e a small list of data detailing how many people chose various animals as their favorite to use as an example.

2. 

   Use your mouse to highlight the cells that contain your data. In this example, cells A1 through B7 are highlighted.

3. 

   Choose the “Insert” menu from the toolbar in Excel. Now choose the “Bar” chart submenu. Pick which type of bar chart you would like to create. For the example, use the simplest 2-D version.

4. 

   Look over the chart you created and decide if you want to make any changes to the format. Feel free to experiment here. If you try something and find that you don’t like it, you can always use the “Undo” key to return to your file’s previous state.

5. 

   Save your file so that you don’t lose your work.

Tips & Warnings

• It’s a good idea to save your work after each step. This will prevent you from having to recreate your work in the case of a computer crash or an electricity outage.

• If you want to experiment without losing your work, you can save each file under a different name. You can always go back and delete the ones you don’t like later.