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How to Make Charts, Graphs in Microsoft Excel 2013, 2010, 2007

by Fahad Saleem

Microsoft Excel is a great tool for data handling, data processing and information showcasing. Millions of people, small business and Enterprise use Excel daily for a variety of reasons. MS Excel has its great nifty feature which lets you carve data and information into pictorial form. This way, you can quickly show your data in the graphs and charts for presentations and other purposes. Let’s see how to make charts in Excel. This tutorial will teach you how to make chart, graph in Excel 2010, 2007 and all other versions as there is not much difference in the options and tools of the Office versions.

Make Charts, Graphs in Excel

In order to make a graph or chart in Excel, you must have the data which you want to show in the graph. Select all the data from the mouse by clicking on the first row and first column, dragging the mouse to the last row and last column. The idea is to select the complete data set for which you want to draw the graph.

Click on the “Insert” option from the tool bar and you will see different types of charts in the charts section. You can select bar graph, line graph, pie chart, and many more.

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You can also select the 3D chart option from the Insert chart option if you want to make a holistic 3D graph for the data. Ever chart has its 3D form in Microsoft Excel.

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The type of chart is important. If the data is sparse and not well connected, pie chart is the best option. If you have stats and trends like scores and marks for different people or teams, you can select column chart. If you select any chart type and find out that this is not what you were looking for, you can click the “Change Chart Type” option from the top left corner of the screen and change the chart.

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You can click the “Switch Row/Column” option to switch the information along axis.

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If you want to revamp and tweak the looks of the chart, you can click the chart layout option from the tiny arrow button as show in the image below.

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If you want to change the name/title of the chart and axis title, the name of the metrics appearing along X and Y axis, you can do so by double clicking the word “Chart Title” and “Axis Title”.

You can also decrease and increase the size of the information and chart. For example, if you made the chart on a data set and now you want to slash some data columns and rows and make an edited chart, you can just click, hold and add or delete the columns and rows and the chart will be edited accordingly. You can toy around with the chart data and interface to find out more functions.

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This was how to make charts in Excel 2007,2010, 2013. If you face any problem in this tutorial of how to make graphs and charts in Excel, share them in the comments.

Images: UberGizmo

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