In this video, I'm going to take you through the basics of Excel charts. You're going to learn
how to insert a chart, how to adjust one, how you
can improve your chart, how to add more series to your chart, and how you can create combination charts. (soft music) Now I've been given this data set and I've been told to visualize this. To insert a chart, all I have
to do is to highlight this, go to Insert, and click
on a chart from here. If I'm not sure which chart to pick, I can click on Recommended Charts and Excel gives me some proposals. So let's say I want to
go with a bar chart, I just have to click on it and press OK. I had highlighted the data set before so let's say I didn't do that just somewhere in an empty cell. And I go to Insert and
I insert a column chart. I just get an empty canvas because the data is missing from here. But notice what happens in
general when you insert charts. You get this Chart Tools
options activated here. And in Excel 2013 and 16,
you're given two tabs, a designed and a format tab. Going back to our empty canvas, if I want to add data to this, I can click on the design
tab and click on Select Data. Or I can right mouse click
and go to Select Data. So with Excel charts, just
like other objects in Excel, you get many different ways
of getting to the same place. So just use the method that
you feel most comfortable with. It might look like charts
has a lot of options, but they're just repeated. So we go to Select Data now we can add the different elements
of the chart manually. This part are my series
values that I want to add in. But first comes the
title, so that's the name. This is where I can manually input it, or I can select it from here. The values are the
numbers, those are these. It added these, it's missing these labels. To give it the labels, you have
to click on this side, Edit, and you just have to highlight
them and you get them in. This is the way that you
can edit your series, and you can add series, you
can also remove your series. Now a fast way to do this is to just click on this
chart data range box here and just select this whole thing, and Excel figures out where to pop what. The quickest way of inserting a chart is to highlight this, and click Alt + F1. This inserts your default charts. How do you change that? You just have to go to Insert, and bring up the dialog
box for all charts, just click on this little icon here. I'm going to go to the line chart. Let's say, line charts are the
charts that I use most often. So I'm going to right mouse
click and set as default. Let's just cancel that, delete this, this is already highlighted, all I have to do is press Alt + F1 and I get my line chart here. (upbeat music) Let's say I've decided to
insert a bar chart for this. I'm going to go to Insert and
directly select it from here. Your chart is comprised of
different chart elements. So this is a chart element, this grid lines are chart
elements, the title is an element. To add in more elements
or to take away elements, you can control that with this plus sign. So let's say I want to
add a data table to this, I can just tick mark it here. To add, Legend doesn't make sense here, but to add data labels, I
can just tick mark this. With this arrows, you
can automatically select where you want it. So these are basically
the most common options of that element or the most
used options of that element. So I can say if I want
inside base inside and then I can go to more options, and I get this dialog box pop up. This dialog box here, that's
where you have full control over all of the options of that element. Depending on the element that you select, you have different options. So it really pays off
that you take some time and you go through the options of the most common chart elements. So example, the columns or the bars, the axis options and so on. To bring that box up again, you can double click, you get this, you can also use the
shortcut key Ctrl + 1, and you come to here, you can also right mouse click and format data series and you get here. Once this is activated, it stays activated when you're in your
chart so you can easily move through the different
elements and adjust your options. Now, let's say my boss sees this report and he's like, why is WenCal up here? Switch this around because
I want it to look like this data table, I want
Fighter to be on top. So that's an easy
adjustment that you can make by just changing the option from here. That's under Axis Options and you can say categories
in reverse order that switches things around. The most important options
for adjusting things of the chart elements is
found in the first one. For example, if you want
to bring these columns, these bars together, you just have to activate this option here
and change the gap width. So instead of 182, I'm going to go to 80%. Now to remove an element, I can remove it by just taking away the the tick mark or I can just press
Delete directly from here. (upbeat music) To adjust formatting of
the different elements, you can do that by clicking
on the element first, and doing it directly from here. So you get the fill
options, borders and so on. Or you can do it from up here. Now if some of these formatting is some things that you use a lot, you can add them to your
Quick Access Toolbar like I've done here. To do that, all you have
to do is right mouse click and click Add to Quick Access Toolbar. You can also directly format
by right mouse clicking on, for example, the series here
and changing the fill color and the outline directly from here. Let's say to improve the
visualization of this, I decide to make my axis line thicker. That's an option that's with the axes. First I have to activate the axis options then I have to go to the
fill and line options and here I can decide for line, okay, I want a solid line,
I want it to be dark, I'm fine with that color,
let's make it thicker. To make this standout, I can
actually directly do that from the home tab. I can decide to make it
bigger and I can make it bold. (upbeat music) Now I've been told to add in the budget because it's going to be nice
to compare the actual to budget. So I find the budget data, now just for the sake of simplicity, I'm just going to make a formula here. This is my budget data now, I
want to add this to my chart, how can I do that? The fastest option is that
you click on your chart and you just expand this, that's it. But the very important
part is that you've clicked on the right place before you expand this. Had I clicked here, and
I wanted to expand this, I can't, it's stuck. So I can expand this
but I can't expand that. I have to click on the chart area, and then I can expand this. Another way of doing this
is to right mouse click and go to Select Data. Here you can manually add in more series. To do that, I can say add, now I'm going to add in budget
again, okay so two times. I can directly type in the name, so let's create a budget duplicate, and for the series values,
I'm going to select these. Here, I get three series added. This is this one, then comes
number two and number three. To change the order around, you can do it by pushing the series up and down from this view. To delete one, you just highlight
it, and you click Remove. Sometimes it can happen
that you add in a series and you don't see it
because it's either white or has no feel, it's invisible. To find it, you can do it
by this drop down here. And this drop down is really important because it shows you all the elements in your chart that are active. You can find your series
directly by just clicking on it and then going about to
format as you see fit. Okay, so don't forget about this drop down so you can easily switch between the different chart
elements from here directly. (upbeat music) So now let's say my boss
sees this and he's like, well, can you show the
budget as another series, maybe as a line series,
or maybe just as markers? To do that, you need to right
mouse click on your series, actually on any series, and go
to Change Series Chart Type. Now Excel takes you
directly to the combo view, where you can see all
your different series here and you can easily change the chart type from this drop down. This is the advantage
of Excel 2013 and 16. In Excel 2010, you actually
have to select really the series that you want to change the chart type of before you change the chart type. But in this case it doesn't matter, if I want to change
the chart type of this, I can still click on this and
say change series chart type and I come to this view. If I don't click on any series and just click somewhere outside
and say change chart type. So notice I don't get
Change Series Chart Type, I get Change Chart Type, I can change the entire chart type. To change different portions,
I have to go to the combo tab. Now the advantage of
clicking on a series first is that you directly go there
when you select this option. So now for budget, I'm
going to change it to align with markers, I'm going to say okay. For this line series,
I'm actually going to say I don't want the line,
I just want the markers. The marker options are right here. Right here, I can say I
want to use the built in, let's use a line, we can increase it, we can change the fill to
the fill color that we want, we can take away the
border of the markers. Now we can go about
improving on this chart, we can add data labels to this. And then from the options, we
can decide where we want them. Now in this case, it doesn't
make sense to put them outside because they're kind of going
to overlap with our budget. So we could do inside base, we can change the color to white. And for these ones, we're
going to add data labels, and we're going to
actually put them on top. Two elements are missing from this chart to make it more readable. One is the chart title, and
the other is the legend here. Now I can go directly here
and say show the legend on top and I can type in a chart title. That could be Sales Actual versus budget. And the legend here, I want
this to be actual, and budget. This is taken from my series name. So all I have to do is
change this to actual. So now my boss should be
happy with this visualization. (upbeat music) So this was the basics of Excel charts. If you want to dig deeper in charts, I have a lot of videos
on this YouTube channel. I also have a lot of posts on my website, so make sure you check those out. If you want to dig even deeper, I have a course on this, an online course that's over seven hours
long that includes templates of different type of charts that are used in the business world so mainly in corporate reports. If you're interested in that, I'm going to put the link to
it in the descriptions below. I hope you enjoyed this video. For more videos like this, don't forget to subscribe to this channel so that you can get updates
when new videos come out.
