How to make a graph on excel

Posted on June 25, 2008 at 5:16 am

Make sure to read other posts from the Excel Tips series!

Many a times a plain tabular data just won’t do to easily explain what is causing what on a given data set. There are situations wherein we want to show in a pie-chart the contributing factors of a totality.

In a household budget for example we want to show the breakup of the total expenses – for example, what makes up the whole monthly expense? For this tip we will assume a data for a monthly expense. You could apply this concept to anything that you want to analyze.

First, put in an Excel sheet all of the data, on column A, put all of the type of expenses and then on column B the amount for each expense:

After putting all of the data, click Insert then Chart…

Choose the Pie under the Standard Types tab, choose the first pie sub-type then click Next

Then choose the columns A and B as data range (choose all data including the headers, do not include the Total row since we only want to show data per expense, press Enter when done):

After choosing the data range you will see the chart preview:

If you are satisfied with the result of the chart preview click next to edit the title of the chart:

The last step will be choosing where you want the chart to appear:

Choose “As new sheet” if you want it to appear on a new worksheet or choose “As Object in” plus the specific worksheet. If you want to make it appear on the same sheet as the tabular data just choose the default and then click Finish.

That’s it, now you have a Pie-chart to show what contributes most to your monthly expense:

Providing visual aids like charts greatly enhances the marketability of your studies. Most of the time readers are not interested with plain numbers so providing them with charts is the best way to get their attention.

Ben Carigtan is a new contributor writer. A Software Engineer with more than 7 years of technical experience, he will be writing articles covering practical advices and tips for computer users.

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3 Responses to “How to make a graph on excel”

Kids said on : June 25th, 2008 at 7:35 am

I think that this is one of the thing that Office 07 improved. Now it’s more easy for begginers.

Greetings from Spain.

ben said on : June 25th, 2008 at 11:47 pm

como estas Kids! (my great ancestors are from Spain!)

I still wish there is an easier way to do this. notice there are a lot of steps?

maybe a right click > insert chart feature in the next MS Office version