How to Create a Chart in Microsoft Excel

This article assumes that you have a basic understanding of how Excel works. For a refresher read my other Excel how to articles prior to starting this one. Here are the steps to add a chart in Excel.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Excel

1. Open Excel

2. 
   Data

   Load a spreadsheet that has some valid data on it. You can type in the numbers in my example as shown in the picture.

3. 
   Highlight

   Highlight the data that you want to add to you chart.

4. 
   Chart Wizard

   Click on the "chart wizard" icon.

5. 
   Column Chart

   This will bring up the chart wizard window. For our example we are going to use the "column" chart type. It is usually the default and already selected, however if it is not, then go ahead and select it. You can also select a chart sub-type, but for now we are going to use the default one chose.

6. 
   Chart Data

   Cick the next button. You should now see the chart source data step. If you selected the data properly in step 3 then this is already filled in for you. If you did not highlight your data prior to this step then you would select it here.

7. 
   Select your Series

   You can choose to have your data in rows or columns. For our data we chose rows because it makes no sense to put our type of data into columns.

8. 
   Click Next

   Click the next button.

9. 
   Chart Title

   You can now label your chart. Type in "My First Column Chart" into the textbox that is labeled, "Chart Title".

10. 
    X Axis

    Enter "Month" into the textbox labeled, "Category (X) Axis".

11. 
    Y Axis

    Enter "Amount" into the textbox labeled, "Value (Y) Axis".

12. 
    Next

    Click the "Next" button.

13. 
    Chart Location

    On the chart location step select "As New Sheet". This will create a new sheet in your workbook and put the chart there. If you wanted the chart to appear in the same sheet as the data, then select the option "As Onject In", and make sure the dropdown box next to it says the sheet name of the sheet where the data is displayed.

14. 
    Finish

    Click the "Finish" button.

15. 
    Chart Result

    Your chart should now appear on the screen with the correct data and labels. If you have been following along in this example using our numbers than your result should look like the picture.

Resources

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