Charts and Dashboards: Getting to Know Charts in Excel
18 October 2019
Welcome to the very first post on Charts and Dashboards blog series. As a fresh start, let’s get to know about Charts and Dashboards in Excel.
What are charts?
Charts are visual representations of data organised into a graphical format. Data is usually represented by symbols like bars in a bar chart, lines in a line chart or areas in an area chart.
Here are some examples of column charts…
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2019/charts-and-dashboards/001-introduction/image1.png/e774d10cbbb9450fc45efbe51abdf434.jpg)
…and line charts:
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2019/charts-and-dashboards/001-introduction/capture.png/e983a7b17fc1ef61166f94c0a09170d4.jpg)
What do I need to create charts?
I simply can create charts using Excel. All Excel versions offer chart creation tools. To insert a chart, this varies slightly between versions of Excel, but typically, it goes something like this. From the Insert tab:
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2019/charts-and-dashboards/001-introduction/image2.png/f32e5a15e2cf9c3e4d2d058458ce054d.jpg)
However, on the Insert tab, there are several new chart types available only in Excel 2016 / Office 365 onwards, such as Box & Whisker, Funnel, Histogram – Pareto, Sunburst, Treemap, Waterfall, and in Excel 2019, Filled map.
There, a key question is: how do you know which version of Excel you are using?
- In the File tab on the Ribbon, choose Account:
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2019/charts-and-dashboards/001-introduction/image3.png/f1140ff857fc3b6f5f97a6a24f4a6fc7.jpg)
- Then, select the ‘About Excel’ option. The version of Excel will be displayed at the top of the pop-up window:
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2019/charts-and-dashboards/001-introduction/image4.png/72aa864d2854c6fefb1083fba0ab5792.jpg)
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2019/charts-and-dashboards/001-introduction/image5.png/36776d1da4d05b45bb5a5d09375f407c.jpg)
What would I use charts for?
The simple answer is to present data!
I am not able to determine patterns in the data just by looking at raw numbers:
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2019/charts-and-dashboards/001-introduction/image6.png/23912d3b1671861e02bebcd5183f1607.jpg)
However, with a chart, life is much easier:
![](http://sumproduct-4634.kxcdn.com/img/containers/main/blog-pictures/2019/charts-and-dashboards/001-introduction/image7.png/6f49c288a0d88a66b427eaf4ece923d6.jpg)
That’s it for this week; check back next week for more Charts and Dashboards tips.