Creating a chart in Excel
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In this video, we are going to look at the basics of creating a chart in Excel. Now, with charts, these can be all sorts of different diagrams, but we are just going to show you the basics of how to put data onto a chart.
So what we have got on the screen here I just added numbers one to seven, so what we could do is have a chart, so we are going to run one to seven and maybe if we just add some more numbers in here if we go eight, nine and 10. So what we are going to do is just highlight those numbers, because we want to turn these into a chart. If we then go up to insert and we go along here, there are some different options with charts, so we can have different ones, we can have pie charts, line charts, bars, all sorts of different things and we are going to go through this one here. So we just want a simple chart, so we can just look at data, so we are looking at doing... We have got some numbers there and we want to just find out how many numbers are within those groups.
So what we have done now is created a basic chart, so what this is saying here, just set the parameters, just the pre-saved one, the two sides of this graph are both the same, because what we have done here, was just run and how many numbers come in between one and five and how many come between six and 10. So it's just a simple little graph. What you can do with that graph if it is in the wrong place, is just get hold of the side of it and drag it to where you want to put it. You can also make the graph bigger as you would with a picture by increasing it or smaller. So these are the basic figures we have put down here, but we can change any of these figures and we can change them on here, and it will change the graph automatically, so it is now taking averages down here of how many of these numbers are within certain groups. It doesn't really matter too much what the chart is doing at this stage, we are just showing you how you can make charts that do different things. So because the chart is there, it's pulling all this data from the side, because I selected it.
So if I change some of these numbers around, you can see the chart will change accordingly, so we can change this to 12, and then you see the data change all the time. So within this here, we can also change the title of the chart by just changing here, so let's just highlight that and call that a test chart, so it's there, and again, we can change it if we want. Now, this again, as we did with the Word docs, we can drag it up and down as well if we wanted to, and we can change data or we may well want the data here, we could put a heading on here as well that just says, say, data. So it's at the top and we are going to bold that, and just so we can see it easier we can just put that into the red. So that's just a very basic chart, it's just taking some random numbers and it's grouping them, how many of those numbers are within certain parameters and how many of the numbers are within another set of parameters. To do that, to refresh it, we went to insert and then we could select what chart we wanted to add to the data.
So charts are something which can make a document look a lot better, so if you are doing your accounts or you are looking at how many products you have sold or things like that, you can create a nice chart that represents it. Profit or loss, you can do a graph with a straight line coming up or dots on a graph, or you can do pie charts with round graphs. There's loads and loads of different things, you can make them very colourful.
- EDSQ Unit 2 LO 8.3