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By adding charts to worksheets, you can illustrate trends and anomalies that may not be apparent from just looking at the values alone. Because Excel 2007 makes it so easy to chart the numbers in a worksheet, you can also experiment with different types of charts until you find the one that best represents the data.
Charting basics
Although Excel automates almost the entire process of charting worksheet data, you may need to be able to tell the x-axis from the y-axis, just in case Excel doesn't draw the chart the way you had in mind. To refresh your memory, the x-axis is the horizontal axis, usually located along the bottom of the chart; the y-axis is the vertical one, usually located on the left side of the chart.
In most charts that use these two axes, Excel plots the categories along the x-axis at the bottom and their relative values along the y-axis on the left. The x-axis is sometimes referred to as the time axis because the chart often depicts values along this axis at different time periods, such as months, quarters, years, and so on.
 | Worksheet values represented graphically in the chart remain dynamically linked to the chart so that, should you make a change to one or more of the charted values in the worksheet, Excel automatically updates the affected part of the chart. |
Creating a chart
Excel makes the process of creating a new chart in a worksheet as painless as possible:
1. Click a cell in the table of data you want graphed, or, when you only want to graph a part of the data in a table, select the cell range including headings and data.
If you find that Excel selects too much or too little table data completing these steps and creating the new chart, click the Edit Data Source button on the Design tab and correct the Chart Data Range in the Edit Source Data dialog box.
2. On the Insert tab of the Ribbon, click the button in the Charts group for the type of chart you want to create: Column, Line, Pie, Bar, Area, XY (Scatter), or Other Charts.
Excel then displays a drop-down chart gallery with thumbnails showing all the different styles you can choose for the type of chart you select.
3. Click the thumbnail with the style of Column, Line, Pie, Bar, Area, XY (Scatter), or Other — Surface, Doughnut, Bubble, or Radar — chart you want to create.
As soon as you click one of the styles in a chart's drop-down style gallery, Excel immediately creates a free-floating chart (called an embedded chart) on the same worksheet as the table of data the chart represents graphically.
Figure 1 shows an embedded two-dimensional clustered column chart that was created after clicking the Clustered Column chart style thumbnail, the first one on the Column chart style gallery. This chart graphs only the first quarter sales in 2008 (without the totals), represented by the preselected range A2:D11 in the table.
Figure 1: An embedded clustered column chart.
 | If you just don't have time to mess with the Chart buttons on the Insert tab of the Ribbon, position the cell cursor in the table of data or select the portion to be charted and then just press F11. Excel then creates a new Clustered Column chart using the table's data or cell selection on its own chart sheet (Chart1), which you can then customize. |
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