Basic Excel Graphs

Today, I'm going over some basic Excel graphing, we'll do some more complicated stuff later. I'd recommend that, if you're completely new to Excel, spend some time with the menus where you find these features.

First couple steps are for complete beginners. Start by highlighting the Y-axis labels, then the X-axis labels (you can switch them around later too; hold ctrl to highlighting non-adjacent cells). Then go to insert and select a graph type.

We chose stacked column, but we can take this and insert images. Right click and go to fill, select picture. You can use to show product images (what you are selling) to make the graphs look more interesting. Once we actually have our graph set up, we can change the elements to add, for example, regression lines, (look in the ribbon), modify the data, or even change the chart type.

If we format the data series, we can use fill to make the pictures stack and scale. You just select the number of units you want each individual image to represent. You can see here that one single John represents 500 units of revenue. From this box, we can also change the colors, text, and so on. To get to this menu, right click and go to "Format...".

Aside from basic, single type charts, we can also use combo graphs. These combine separate graph types into one. For example, bar and line.

I changed the data a bit to show target revenues from each year (line) alongside actual revenues (bars). You'll notice I have two sets of X-axis datapoints highlighted. Some of the formatting will need to be fixed later, but you can find all of that in the formatting tab.

There are also some graphs we can use to represent proportionality (pie and stacked line). You can see where to find them below.

I'll post some more complicated and interesting iterations later (stay tuned) but hopefully this will get us set up as an introduction to graphing.

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