Page 533 - Excel 2013 All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 1: Charting Worksheet Data
In This Chapter
✓ Understanding how to chart worksheet data
✓ Creating an embedded chart or one on its own chart sheet
✓ Editing an existing chart
✓ Formatting the elements in a chart
✓ Saving customized charts as templates and using these templates to create new charts
✓ Adding sparklines to worksheet data
✓ Printing a chart alone or with its supporting data
Charts present the data from your worksheet visually by representing the data in rows and columns as bars on a chart, for example, or as pieces of a pie in a pie chart. For a long time, charts and graphs have gone hand-in-hand with spreadsheets because they allow you to see trends and patterns that you often can’t readily visualize from the numbers alone. Which has more consistent sales, the Southeast region or the Northwest region? Monthly sales reports may contain the answer, but a bar chart based on the data shows it more clearly.
In this chapter, you first become familiar with the terminology that Excel uses as it refers to the parts of a chart — terms that may be new, such as data marker and chart data series, as well as terms that are probably familiar already, such as axis. After you get acquainted with the terms, you begin to put them to use going through the simple steps required to create the kind of chart that you want, either as part of the worksheet or a separate chart sheet.
The art of preparing a chart (and much of the fun) is matching a chart type to your purposes. To help you with this, I guide you through a tour of all the chart types available in Excel 2013, from old standbys, such as bar and column charts, to ones that may be new to you, such as radar charts and surface charts. Finally, you discover how to print charts, either alone or as part of the worksheet.