Excel Charts - Explaining Your Data Visually

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and that's especially true today when our ability to gather data is growing exponentially while our ability to analyze it is not. Excel charts give you a powerful and easy to use tool for visually presenting complex data.

This live program will explain and demonstrate how to:

• Choose the type of chart that best explains your data;
• Organize your data to make charting easy;
• Build a simple chart in one click using Excel's Insert ribbon;
• Preview different chart types to see which works best for you;
• Move and size a chart;
• Choose which data to plot on the horizontal and vertical axes;
• Add, remove and format chart elements, such as titles, axis and data labels, tick marks and grid lines;
• Choose custom fonts and colors for chart elements, customize axis scale and intervals, and reposition and resize chart elements;
• Use graphics to build various chart elements, for example stacked oil drums in a column chart to represent quantities of oil production or consumption;
• Connect multiple charts to the same data so they update together;
• Build and apply reusable chart templates; and
• Combine several chart types, for example column and line charts, in the same plot area (sometimes called an overlay chart).

Most of the features to be discussed work in PowerPoint as well.

There will be plenty of time for questions, so come prepared.