Excel Tutorial - How to make a simple graph or chart in Excel

Posted on July 27, 2007 at 5:00 pm

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

Microsoft Excel Basics Tutorial - Learning how to use Excel
Excel Tips & Tricks - How to unprotect only a portion of an Excel spreadsheet
Excel Basics - How to use the Conditional Sum wizard
How to use Data Validation in Microsoft Excel to create dropdown lists
Excel Tutorial - How to make a simple graph or chart in Excel
Excel Tutorial - Example of how to use the VLOOKUP function

Excel is a powerful tool that you can use to create charts and graphs for small or large amounts of data. In this Excel tutorial, I’ll show you how to take a small set of data and create a simple bar graph, along with the options you have to customize the graph. Once you have the basics down, you can use those same techniques on larger sets of data.

First off, I’ve created a set of student test data for our example. There are eight students with their test scores on four exams. To make this into a chart, you first want to select the entire range of data, including the titles (Test 1, etc).

Now that your data is selected as shown above, go ahead and click on the Chart Wizard button in the Excel toolbar. The button has a little graph inside of it as the icon. If you can’t see the icon or it’s not on your toolbar, you can click on the Insert menu and choose Chart.

For Step 1 of the wizard, we need to pick the kind of graph that we want to display the data on. Remember, even if you pick the wrong one, you can always change the chart type later on. For our example, click on Bar and choose the first option on the second row:

You can click “Press and Hold to View Sample” to get a preview of what the chart will look like. There are literally dozens of chart types that you can choose from, so go ahead and play around by previewing different ones. Click Next to configure the source data. On Step 2, we can tell Excel whether we want it to read the data in series from rows or from columns. This might not make sense, but in our example if you choose Rows, the Y-axis is the Tests and for each test, all of the names are lines in the graph:

In this graph, I can easily compare each student’s grade on each exam. If you choose Columns, we’ll see each student along the Y-axis and their scores as lines in the graph:

Easy huh? Ok once you pick the graph style you like, click Next. Step 3 allows us to customize a few necessary items of the chart, such as the Title, units for the X and Y axes, the position of the legend, and whether or not the values should be listed on the graph.

I went ahead and added a Title, moved my legend to the bottom so my chart has more horizontal space, and added labels to the bar lines. Click Next and choose whether you want to create the graph in a new sheet or dump it on the same sheet as an object. Here’s our final chart:

That’s it! Of course there is a lot more stuff you can do with the chart (like change those horrible default colors) if you right-click in the empty white space, but that’s for another lesson.

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