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Before you make your chart, you must insert your data into an excel spreadsheet. This is a pretty simple process which you just click in a cell and put information in. After you have your information in the spreadsheet, you can create your chart. As of now I have only created a tutorial on making Bar/Column graphs, but I intend to add help with more types of graphs in the near future, so please check back later.
Bar/Column Graphs For the purpose of teaching you how to make these graphs, I have made up some example data to be used. The data was put into the excel spreadsheet and looks like this:
Once you have your information in the spreadsheet, you'll want to click in the first cell containing the desired data and drag to the last cell containing the data. This will highlight the cells you want to make the chart out of. For me, I would highlight cells A1 to B7. Now go ahead and go to Insert>Chart... (or just push Alt+i+h) and a chart wizard will appear. Select the bar or column chart and a desired type from the list, then select 'Next'. Now you will be looking at a preview of what the chart looks like. In case your chart does not look how you want it to look, I will now continue on how to manually edit the layout of your graph. First, lets go over a few terms that you'll want to know. What I had you select before you opened up the chart wizard is what is called your "Data Range" and broken down within that are series, which are more specific ranges of data. With my weight and distance graph, this is what Excel automatically did with my data:
That is not quite what I wanted, but by changing the series a little, we can get what we want. Pretty much my intention was to show the change in distance according to the change in weight. If you click on the "Series" tab in the Step 2 of 4 chart wizard box, then you will be looking at the data for each series. For my purpose I do not need a weight series, so I am just going to remove that from the list. I do, however still want weight to be included in the graph, but I want the values along the X-axis to be the weights. So in the "Category (X) axis labels:" area, I am going to click the icon next to the source data field and highlight the numbers under the weight information:
After that you can click that same icon again and you'll be looking at the wizard box again. If you would like to change your values at all you can follow the same process, but click on the icon next to the "Values" source data area. And likewise, you can do the same for the series' Name, or just type in what you want it to be. Once you have that looking the way you want, select Next, and you'll be looking at chart options to work with. This part is pretty simple, and easy to figure out. Just select or deselect options to get what you want, keeping an eye on the preview shown to the right. After you are content with those options, select Next once more and you will be prompted with the choice to insert it as a new sheet, or insert it into an existing sheet. Do whichever you prefer, and your end result should look something like this:
Now that you have your chart completed, you can select specific parts of the table and change the sizes and such. Also, if you select something and right-click, you can select Format Legend and change the colors and other aspects of your graph. Adding Multiple Trials/Series: If you want to add more trials or something like that, you simply make another series for each one:
Please Check back later for information on how to create other charts. Now that you know how to make a chart, you can insert it in power point and animate it. For more information on how to do that, view the Animating Charts in Power Point tutorial.
-WebCrew, Eilert |
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