Excel16 -3- Figures and graphs

Creating a graph or a figure in MS Excel isn’t very complicated… as long as you have an idea of how the result should look like. Do you want to create a histogram? a bar graph? a pie chart? a scatter plot? Will you have one or several datasets to show in this graph? Will you need a secondary Y-axis? error bars? labels? Let’s see that step-by-step.

Before we start discussing details about creating graphs in MS Excel 2016, it is best that we agree on a few terms and concepts. What you will learn to create in this section is an embedded graph or chart. “Embedded” means that the chart appears next to your data in […]

1. Familiarize yourself with a few terms.

in Excel16 -3- Figures and graphs / MS Excel 2016 (EN)

As you will soon discover, the tools that MS Excel 2016 offers in order to let you build a chart work best when your data are “packed” in tables, rows and columns. Anyway, it is always good practice to organize your dataset so that data which depend on common variables […]

2. Organize your data/series in rows, columns or tables

in Excel16 -3- Figures and graphs / MS Excel 2016 (EN)

Since it is your first chart, we’ll take it easy and use a single dataset. Let’s use the previous example, concentrating on temperatures in Bergen between Sept. 19th and Sept. 27th 2015. The “easy way” consists in selecting the data which has to be contained in the graph: this means […]

3. Make your first line chart

in Excel16 -3- Figures and graphs / MS Excel 2016 (EN)

Now that the graph has been created, you might want to personalize its appearance by adding titles, changing colors, putting a background, and so on. Let’s start by adding colors to the background of the chart area and of the plot area. First, colors: right-click on the chart area, preferably […]

4. Add title, axis names, legend, colors…

in Excel16 -3- Figures and graphs / MS Excel 2016 (EN)

Now that you have managed to make your first line chart, you might want to make things a bit “spicier” by adding an extra line chart to the existing one (Yeah, I know… not really what you consider “spicy”). If you had previously opted for creating your graph using the […]

5. Add a series to an existing chart

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In the example that we have just built here, we want to keep the data series which represents temperatures as a line chart and show the rain data as vertical bars (see picture to the right). First we need to select the data series “rain” and call the option to […]

6. Modify the chart style (lines, bars, columns…)

in Excel16 -3- Figures and graphs / MS Excel 2016 (EN)

Here, our goal is to keep using the left Y-axis for the temperature chart, while we set up a new (secondary) Y-axis to the right side of the graph that will be dedicated to the rain chart. Right-click directly on the rain data series in the plot area to open […]

7. Add a secondary Y-axis

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Let’s now take care of the fact that the temperature line is located quite high in the plot area (top right picture). Most of the values are comprised between 12 and 16, but the chart using a range from 0 to 18 to display the chart. If we want to […]

8. Ajust the range/units of the Y-axis

in Excel16 -3- Figures and graphs / MS Excel 2016 (EN)

MS Excel offers an option to draw a trendline on top of your data series. This can be quite helpful to show a trend when the data is a bit to scattered to draw conclusions or when you want to simplify the “look” of your chart. To do so, click […]

9. Add a trendline to a data series

in Excel16 -3- Figures and graphs / MS Excel 2016 (EN)

It is often useful or required to show the variability of your data when making a chart. This variability can easily be translated by error bars added along your plot line or bars. The bars may represent standard deviation, standard error of the mean, confidence intervals… you choose. Let’s take […]

10. Add error bars to a data series

in Excel16 -3- Figures and graphs / MS Excel 2016 (EN)

It is not so often that one gets to use a pie chart… and it is not so often that such a chart is used for the right purpose. Pie charts can be used to represent different categories of a population, polls, data referring on proportions and percentage. Let’s learn how to make […]

11. Make a pie chart

in Excel16 -3- Figures and graphs / MS Excel 2016 (EN)

You may realize, looking at the pie chart that we just made previously, that the design of the chart area is rather inadequate. The chart itself is ridiculously small compared to the legend. This is essentially due to a default setting that MS Excel uses and which restricts the size/position of the […]