How to Create a Visual Report in Excel

Staring at a spreadsheet full of numbers is rarely the best way to understand business performance. Raw data lacks context, making it tough to spot trends or share key findings with your team. This guide will walk you through transforming your raw Excel data into a clean, insightful, and professional visual report.

Why Bother with Visual Reports in Excel?

While rows and columns of data are necessary for storage and calculation, they aren't great for quick analysis. The human brain processes visual information much faster than text. When you convert your numbers into charts and graphs, you instantly unlock several benefits:

• Quick Insights: A line chart immediately shows you if sales are trending up or down, something you might miss by just scanning numbers.

• Better Communication: It's much easier to present a few clear bar charts in a meeting than to ask your team to interpret a massive data table.

• More Engagement: Visuals are simply more engaging. A clean, colorful report holds attention and makes your findings more memorable.

Done right, a visual report in Excel can act as a simple dashboard, giving you a digestible overview of your key metrics at a glance.

Start with Well-Structured Data

You can't build a great visual report on a foundation of messy data. Before you even think about creating your first chart, spending a few minutes organizing your spreadsheet will save you a lot of headaches. Your goal is to have your data in a simple, tabular format.

1. Follow Simple Criteria for Clean Data:

• One Header Row: Your table should have a single row at the top for headers (e.g., Date, Region, Sales, Product Category). Avoid merged cells or multiple header rows.

• No Blank Rows or Columns: Ensure there are no completely empty rows or columns cutting through your data range.

• Consistent Data Types: Keep the data within each column consistent. The "Date" column should only contain dates, and the "Sales" column should only contain currency or numbers.

2. Convert Your Data into an Excel Table

This is arguably the most important preparation step. Converting your data range into an official Excel Table (not just a set of formatted cells) supercharges your reporting. It turns a static range into a dynamic object that charts and PivotTables can easily reference.

Here's how to do it:

1. Click anywhere inside your clean data range.

2. Go to the Insert tab on the Ribbon.

3. Click Table.

4. Excel will automatically detect your data range. Make sure the "My table has headers" box is checked if you have a header row.

5. Click OK.

Your data will now be formatted with colored bands and filter toggles. More importantly, when you add new rows of data to the bottom, the table automatically expands, and any charts tied to it will update instantly.

Choosing the Right Chart for the Job

With clean data in an Excel Table, you're ready to visualize it. The key is picking the right chart type to answer your specific question. Using the wrong chart can be just as confusing as looking at raw numbers.

Column or Bar Charts: For Comparisons

Use a column chart (vertical bars) or a bar chart (horizontal bars) when you need to compare values across different categories.

• Excellent for: Comparing sales by product, showing website traffic by channel, or looking at performance across different sales reps.

• Pro Tip: Use a standard column chart for a smaller number of categories. If you have long category names or many categories, switch to a bar chart to keep labels readable.

Line Charts: For Trends Over Time

Line charts are the best choice for showing how a value changes over a continuous period, like days, months, quarters, or years.

• Excellent for: Tracking monthly revenue, daily website sessions, or quarterly customer growth.

• Pro Tip: Using too many lines on one chart can get messy. Stick to comparing two or three key metrics to keep it clear.

Pie & Donut Charts: For Parts of a Whole

These charts are used to show the proportion each category contributes to a total. Think of them as showing percentages.

• Excellent for: Displaying the percentage breakdown of a marketing budget by channel or market share between a few competitors.

• Pro Tip: Use pie charts sparingly. They become hard to read with more than 3-4 categories. If you have many small "slices," a bar chart is often a clearer alternative.

Scatter Plots: For Relationships and Distribution

A scatter plot is used to see if there's a relationship - a correlation - between two different numerical variables.

• Excellent for: Seeing if there's a relationship between advertising spend and revenue, or between temperature and ice cream sales.

Start simple. For most business reports, you'll find that column charts and line charts cover over 90% of your needs.

Step-by-Step: Building a Simple Sales Report

Let's walk through creating a visual report using a simple sales dataset. Imagine our table has columns for Order Date, Product Category, Customer Region, and Sales Amount.

Step 1: Create a Dedicated Dashboard Worksheet

Avoid building your report on the same sheet as your raw data. Create a new, blank worksheet and name it "Dashboard" or "Report." This keeps your presentation clean and separate from the underlying clutter of your data table.

Step 2: Insert a PivotTable as Your Data Engine

While you can create charts directly from your Excel Table, PivotTables give you far more flexibility. They act as a powerful engine that can summarize your data on the fly.

1. Go to your data sheet and click your Excel Table.

2. Go to the Insert tab and click PivotTable.

3. In the dialog box, ensure your table name is in the 'Table/Range' field.

4. Choose Existing Worksheet and select a cell on your new "Dashboard" sheet (e.g., cell A1). This will place the PivotTable on your report sheet. Click OK.

You’ll now have a blank PivotTable on your dashboard sheet and a “PivotTable Fields” panel on the right. This is where the magic happens.

Step 3: Create Your First Chart (Sales by Category)

Let's create a column chart to see which product category is performing best.

1. In the "PivotTable Fields" panel, drag Product Category into the Rows area.

2. Drag Sales Amount into the Values area. Your PivotTable will now show a summary of sales for each category.

3. Click inside your new PivotTable.

4. Go to the PivotTable Analyze tab and click PivotChart.

5. Choose a Clustered Column chart and click OK.

You now have your first chart! You can move and resize it anywhere on your dashboard sheet.

Step 4: Create a Second Chart (Sales Over Time)

Now, let’s add a line chart to see our monthly sales trend. Instead of making a new PivotTable, you can just copy the first one.

1. Copy and paste your entire PivotTable to a new location on the same dashboard sheet (e.g., a few columns over). This creates an independent but identical PivotTable.

2. Click on your new PivotTable. In the "PivotTable Fields" panel, remove Product Category from the Rows area.

3. Drag Order Date into the Rows area. Excel will automatically group the dates by months and quarters.

4. Click inside this second PivotTable, go to PivotTable Analyze > PivotChart.

5. This time, select a Line chart and click OK.

Arrange this new line chart next to your column chart on the dashboard sheet.

Step 5: Add Interactivity with Slicers

Slicers are user-friendly buttons that let you (and your team) filter the data in your reports without needing to understand PivotTables. Let’s add a slicer for Customer Region.

1. Click on any of your PivotCharts.

2. On the PivotTable Analyze tab, click Insert Slicer.

3. Check the box for Customer Region and click OK.

A slicer menu for regions will appear. Right now, it only controls one chart. Let's connect it to both.

1. Right-click the slicer and select Report Connections.

2. In the dialog box, check the boxes for both of your PivotTables. Click OK.

Now, when you click a region in the slicer (e.g., "North America"), both your "Sales by Category" and "Sales Over Time" charts will instantly update to show data for only that region. This makes your report dynamic and great for exploring your data.

Design Tips for a Professional Look

The final step is to clean up your visual report so it's easy to read and looks professional. Little changes can make a huge difference.

• Give Charts a Title: Double-click the default chart title ("Total") and give it a clear, descriptive name like "Sales Revenue by Product Category."

• Remove the Clutter: You can often remove chart elements to make the data stand out. Click on a chart, then click the '+' icon that appears on the right. Uncheck elements like Gridlines for a cleaner look. You can also hide the grey field buttons on the chart by right-clicking one and selecting "Hide all field buttons on chart."

• Use Color Strategically: Move away from Excel's default blue. Click your chart, go to the Chart Design tab, and choose a color palette that aligns with your brand or helps tell your story. Keep it consistent across all charts.

• Use Space Intentionally: Don’t cram everything together. Leave some whitespace around your charts and slicers. On your dashboard sheet, go to the View tab and uncheck "Gridlines" to get a clean, white background for your report.

Final Thoughts

Creating visual reports in Excel doesn't have to be complicated. By starting with clean, structured data in an official Excel Table and then using PivotTables and PivotCharts, you can build dynamic, insightful, and easy-to-understand dashboards. The key is in choosing the right chart for your data and cleaning up the design to make your insights a priority for audiences.

While Excel is a powerful tool for this, the process of downloading CSVs, cleaning them, and rebuilding reports on a weekly basis can be time-consuming. We built Graphed to automate all of that tedious manual work. Bypassing spreadsheets completely, we directly connect to your data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce to create live, real-time dashboards for a hassle-free, fully-interactive experience - just using plain English to get it done.