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  • Go beyond the basic chart type

    Excel comes with lots of predefined chart types, including column, line, pie, and so on. However, many of you ask how to make other kinds of charts, such as floating column charts, Gantt charts, combination charts, org charts, flow charts, hierarchy charts, histograms, or Pareto charts. While none of these are available as predefined chart types, don't worry. There are ways to create these in Excel. ...( read more ) Read More...
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  • Line or scatter chart?

    Ah, the great questions of life: Paper or plastic? Line chart or scatter chart? Choosing the wrong chart type for your data can easily happen when it comes to line and scatter charts. They look very similar, especially when a scatter chart is displayed with connecting lines, but there is a big difference in the way each of these chart types plots data along the horizontal and vertical axes. Let Excel writer Frederique be your guide as to which type of chart to use and when. ...( read more ) Read...
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  • Apollo 11 & Excel – How did we do that?

    A couple of weeks ago, as part of our Watch History Reimagined series, we posted a video to show you how Excel might've helped the team at NASA work through some of the tensest moments in American history. Some of you asked us how we created certain visualizations that appear in the video. In today's post, we point you to the source workbook and data used to make the video and show you how to recreate a couple of the chart and slicer effects. Enjoy! ...( read more ) Read More...

  • Create Convincing Visualizations by Adding Reference Lines to Your Excel Charts

    Have you ever wanted to add a horizontal or vertical line to your chart to indicate a key value, sales threshold, important date, or the average of your data? Are you looking to impress managers and convince clients with your superb charts? Reference Lines (see the dotted black line on the chart below) can be powerful tools in effectively communicating important points in your data. There is currently no specific built-in functionality for creating Reference Lines in Excel 2010, but there are still...
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  • Free training: Take the next steps in growing your Excel skills

    In early May, we told you about the new video series Excel Skills Builder in our post " Take the first step in growing your Excel skills ." In that post, we announced the launch of lesson 1. Well, we've finally finished the rest of the lessons, and wanted to share this great resource with you! As a reminder, the skills builder is a video series that comprises short (typically under 5 minutes each) videos that give you an overview of a task or feature in Excel. The videos are grouped...

  • Format column sparkline charts using the data axis and cell merging

    Sparkline charts are great, but there may be times they need a little visual massaging to maximize their usefulness. Consider this scenario: You have a system for which you want to track downtime over the course of a year and (fortunately) it had downtime events in only four of twelve months. Here's how to use and format sparkline charts to show this data effectively. ...( read more ) Read More...
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  • Can’t find the Chart Wizard? No worries

    Going, going, gone! Yes, it’s true that the Chart Wizard was removed from the product when we shipped Excel 2007, and we didn’t bring it back in Excel 2010. For those of you upgrading from Excel 97-2003, this may come as a big shock. The Chart Wizard provided a useful four-step process that you could simply follow to create a chart with a finishing touch. Unfortunately, it didn’t make sense to update the Chart Wizard to incorporate the many changes that were made when the chart...

  • 10 Days for Office 2010 Series – Reviewing the Dow Jones Industrial in Excel 2010

    Today’s post was written by Excel MVP Nate Oliver. Excel 2010 presents traditional numerical analysts with new and old tools; today we’ll explore two of them. The difference is that the first shall be what we call qualitative, and the second, quantitative. As a real-world example, on a really hot day, qualitative could mean hot, while quantitative could mean 100F. We shall explore both, with Excel 2010, with respect to the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). Read more here... Read More...

  • Hover Charts

    Thanks to Dan Battagin for writing this blog post. OK, so I'm sure everyone knows about the Freeze Panes feature in Excel - it's been around forever, and it's pretty useful in certain circumstances where you want to keep a row (or more) of data at the top of the sheet, or column on the side of the sheet - especially for filtering. Of course, we've made it a little less necessary in the 2007 and 2010 releases, since table headers (2007) and now table filters (2010) automatically camp...

  • Scatter charts with PowerPivot

    Rob over at http://powerpivotpro.com has a interesting post on scatter charts and PowerPivot: At right is a list of all chart types in Excel. But not all of them are supported as PivotCharts. Try to use XY (Scatter), Bubble, or Stock as a PivotChart, and you’ll get an alert saying you cannot create it with pivot data. So, do you give up? Nope. Remember the post where I converted a PivotTable to Cube Formulas using that button on the ribbon? This is a wonderful opportunity to use that feature in an...
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  • Excel Add-In for Manipulating Points on Charts (MPOC)

    Overview In Excel 2007, the ability to directly resize or reposition points on the chart was deprecated. This feature was sometimes referred to as "Graphical Goal Seek." For example, in Excel 2003 a user could click on a data point in a column chart twice which would surface handles that could be used to resize the columns. Over the last couple of years we have received a lot of feedback from customers indicating that this was a valuable feature for some scenarios. However, we were not...

  • More Charting Enhancements in Excel 2010

    I’m back from my vacation (boy, Seattle is really gorgeous during the summer!). Thanks to Sam Radakovitz (Sam Rad) for filling in for me while I was out. And thanks to Ben Rampson and Robin Wakefield for putting together this final post on charting improvements in Excel 2010. In this post I’ll walk through some more of the new charting features available in Excel 2010. These include: PivotChart Interactivity Formatting Enhancements Parity Improvements Limit Increases Pivot Chart Interactivity In...
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  • Improvements to Chart Performance

    Thanks to Ben Rampson for putting this post together. In today’s article I will outline some of the significant new chart improvements that impact performance. In Office 2007 the graphics engine used by Office Charts was replaced with one that could support more complex rendering. A downside of this change was slower performance in certain scenarios relative to Office 2003. For example, supporting anti-aliasing in Office 2007 allows the chart to render smooth lines; however, the computation for smoothing...

  • How to Create a Professional Chart using Excel 2007

    Today's author, Robin Wakefield, a Program Manager on the Excel team, discusses charts. As a new program manager in Excel one of my first tasks was to understand what problems users encounter when building professional charts in Excel. I defined professional as following the principles of Edward Tufte by reducing the amount of non-data ink on a chart. On an earlier post , there were a lot of comments about this particular aspect and I agree we could do better in helping users accomplish this...
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