You can really customize your chart using these options. Go ahead and click on these and try them out to see what kind of effect they have on the chart. Moving along the ribbon still under Layout, you’ll see a bunch of other options in the Labels, Axes, and Background sections. In this case, I can add shadows, rotate the text, add a background color, etc. I’ll get a dialog window that will let me adjust any and all properties for that object. Suppose I click on Horizontal (Category) Axis and then click on Format Selection. Here you can see all the different sections you can select: There’s a drop down box that lets you pick any specific part of the chart and then you can click Format Selection to change the settings for just that one part. The best part I like is right on the left part of the ribbon called Current Selection. This is a very important tab because you can tweak pretty much every little detail about your chart here. Next let’s move on to the Layout tab under Charts Tools. Now just double-click on the text boxes and you can give the X and Y axis a title along with giving the chart a title also. You can always change the layout and it won’t mess up the chart in any way.
#HOW TO GRAPH USING EXCEL ON MAC FREE#
Feel free to choose other layouts just to see how the chart changes. If you pick the one shown above, you chart will now look like this with the additional axis titles added for you. Here you’ll see a bunch of different ways we can change the layout. An easy way to do this is to click on the little down arrow with a line on top of it under Chart Layouts. Now let’s make our chart a little nicer by adding some titles, etc. It’s very easy to pick out who did the best and who did the worst on each test when the data is displayed like this. This chart is useful too because now I can see the scores for all the students per exam. Now here’s what the chart looks like with the same data, but with X and Y switched. One neat thing you can do is click on Switch Row/Column under Data and the chart will instantly change with the data switched. Here you can change everything under the sun when it comes to your new chart. That’s great, but what if I wanted to visualize the data in a different way? Well, by default, once the chart is added, you’ll see a new section at the top of the ribbon called Chart Tools with three tabs: Design, Layout and Format.
Each student has four bars for their respective test scores.
In the above example, I see each person along the X axis and the test scores on the Y axis. Creating a chart is easy, but what you can do with your chart after making it is what makes Excel such a great tool. That’s it! You have created your first graph/chart in Excel and it literally takes just a few minutes. So now Excel will create the chart based on the data and dump it somewhere on your sheet. There are many options! Also, don’t worry because if you pick a chart you don’t like, you can easily change to another chart type with just a click of your mouse. Click on Column and then select the type of chart you would like. For our example, we will try use a column chart to visualize the data. If you want a different type of chart, just click on Other Charts. A little to the right, you’ll see the Charts section as shown below.īy default, it tries to list out the most common types of charts such as Column, Line, Pie, Bar, Area, and Scatter.
Now that your data is selected as shown above, go ahead and click on the Insert tab on the ribbon interface.