How to Create a Horizontal Bar Chart in Excel

When you need to quickly compare values between different categories, like sales figures across products or website traffic from various social media channels, a horizontal bar chart is one of the best tools for the job. It's clean, easy to read, and excellent at telling a story at a glance. This guide will walk you through exactly how to create and customize a great-looking horizontal bar chart in Microsoft Excel.

When Should You Use a Horizontal Bar Chart?

While Excel offers dozens of chart types, horizontal bar charts truly shine in specific situations. They are incredibly effective for visualizing comparisons between discrete categories when you want to see which category is bigger or smaller, ranked higher or lower.

Here’s when they work best:

• Comparing ranked items: If you want to see how different items stack up against each other, like ranking your top-performing blog posts by page views or comparing sales representatives by revenue closed, a bar chart is perfect. Sorting the bars from largest to smallest makes the ranking immediately obvious.

• You have long category labels: This is a key advantage over vertical column charts. If your category names are long (e.g., "Facebook Mobile Feed Ad Campaign - Q3"), they can get cramped or forced into an angle on a vertical chart. On a horizontal bar chart, long labels have plenty of room to be displayed clearly and legibly along the vertical axis (Y-axis).

• Displaying negative values: Horizontal bar charts can effectively show both positive and negative values, with bars extending to the right (positive) and left (negative) from a central zero-line. This is useful for things like showing profit and loss for different departments.

Preparing Your Data in Excel

Before you can make a chart, you need well-organized data. A great chart starts with a clean dataset. For a standard horizontal bar chart, your data structure should be simple: one column for your categories and one column for their corresponding numerical values.

For example, let's say you want to visualize website traffic sources for the last month. Your data in Excel should look something like this:

A Quick Tip on Sorting

For maximum impact, it's almost always a good idea to sort your data before creating the chart. Sorting the values from largest to smallest (or smallest to largest) will create a chart that’s instantly understandable because the bars will appear in a logical order.

To sort your data:

1. Select your entire data range, including the headers.

2. Go to the Data tab on the Excel ribbon.

3. Click the Sort button.

4. In the dialog box, under "Sort by," choose the column with your numerical values (e.g., "Sessions").

5. Under "Order," select Largest to Smallest for a descending-order chart, which is the most common format.

6. Click OK.

Your table will now be sorted, with your highest value at the top, ready for visualization.

Creating a Horizontal Bar Chart: A Step-by-Step Guide

With your data prepped and sorted, creating the chart takes just a few clicks. Follow these steps to generate your first horizontal bar chart.

1. Select Your DataClick and drag your mouse to highlight the cells containing the heading and all the data you want to include in your chart. In our example table above, you would select cells A1 through B7.

2. Go to the Insert TabAt the top of the Excel window, click on the "Insert" tab in the main ribbon menu.

3. Find the Charts GroupIn the middle of the Insert ribbon, you'll see a section called "Charts." This is where you'll find all of Excel's visualization options.

4. Choose the Bar Chart TypeClick on the icon that looks like a horizontal bar chart, labeled "Insert Bar or Column Chart." A dropdown menu will appear with several options.

5. Select "2-D Clustered Bar"Under the "2-D Bar" section, hover over and click the first option, which is the "Clustered Bar" chart. Excel will instantly generate and place the chart on your worksheet.

That's it! You now have a basic horizontal bar chart. You'll notice that Excel reverses the order of the categories - the item at the bottom of your data table appears as the top bar on the chart. This is standard Excel behavior but is easy to fix in the customization stage.

Making Your Bar Chart Shine: Customization Tips

A basic chart gets the job done, but a few customizations can turn it into a professional, easy-to-read visualization that communicates your point clearly.

1. Fix the Category Order

Let's start by fixing the category order so it matches your sorted data table. This will put "Organic Search" (our top traffic source) at the top of the chart.

• Right-click on the vertical axis labels (e.g., "Organic Search," "Direct," etc.).

• From the context menu, select Format Axis...

• In the "Format Axis" pane that opens, check the box for Categories in reverse order.

Your chart will now display the bars in the same descending order as your data, with the longest bar at the top.

2. Add a Clear Chart Title

A chart without a title is like a story without a headline. It's missing essential context. To add or edit your title:

• Click on the "Chart Title" text box at the top of your chart.

• If there isn't one, click the plus sign (+) next to the chart and check the box for Chart Title.

• Replace the default text with a descriptive title, like "Website Traffic by Source - Last 30 Days."

3. Change Colors and Styles

Default blue might not match your company's branding or the story you're trying to tell. Changing colors is simple.

• Double-click on any of the bars to select the data series.

• With the bars selected, go to the Chart Design tab that appears at the top.

• Click Change Colors to pick from a predefined color palette, or manually change the color by right-clicking the bars, selecting Format Data Series, and using the Fill options in the right-hand pane.

4. Add Data Labels for Precision

Sometimes you want your audience to see the exact numbers without having to guess based on the horizontal axis gridlines.

• Select your chart.

• Click the green plus sign (Chart Elements) on the top-right side of the chart.

• Check the box for Data Labels. The numerical values will appear on the bars.

• You can click the little arrow next to Data Labels to customize their position (e.g., "Inside End," "Center").

5. Clean Up by Removing Unnecessary Elements

Now that you've added data labels, the horizontal axis (X-axis) and the gridlines might be redundant. Removing them can make your chart look cleaner and more focused.

• Click on the horizontal axis scale at the bottom of the chart and press the Delete key.

• Click on any of the gridlines and press the Delete key.

Your chart is now much simpler, relying on the bar lengths and direct labels to convey the information.

Advanced Option: Creating a Stacked Horizontal Bar Chart

A stacked bar chart is useful when you want to compare totals across categories while also seeing the breakdown of those totals into sub-components. For example, comparing sales by region and breaking down each region's total by product category.

Data Setup

Your data needs more than one value column. For instance:

How to Create It

1. Select your entire data set (A1 through C4 in the example above).

2. Go to the Insert tab > Insert Bar or Column Chart.

3. This time, under "2-D Bar," choose the second option, "Stacked Bar."

Excel will create a chart where each bar represents the total users for each source, and the bar is color-coded to show the proportion of new versus returning users.

Final Thoughts

Creating a horizontal bar chart in Excel is a straightforward process that transforms raw data into a clear comparative story. By preparing your data, choosing the right chart type, and applying a few key customizations, you can build effective visuals that highlight your most important findings with clarity and impact.

As you become more comfortable building charts in Excel, you might find that the real work is getting your data in one place to begin with - especially when trying to report on performance across several different apps like Shopify, Salesforce, and Google Analytics. When manually exporting CSVs and building reports feels like a bottleneck, it's often a signal to look for more automated solutions. We built Graphed to solve this very problem by connecting directly to your tools, eliminating the manual work. You can create real-time horizontal bar charts and dashboards for your business just by describing what you want to see.