How to Make a Time Series Plot in Excel with AI
Tracking your data over time is essential for spotting trends, understanding seasonality, and forecasting what's next for your business. A time series plot is the perfect visual tool for this, but creating one in Excel can feel like a chore filled with clicks, adjustments, and formatting menus. This article will walk you through the traditional way to build a time series chart in Excel and then show you a dramatically faster, AI-powered method to get the same result in seconds.
What is a Time Series Plot (And Why You Need One)
A time series plot, or time series graph, is simply a chart that shows data points collected at successive, equally spaced time intervals. It has two axes: the horizontal axis (x-axis) represents time, and the vertical axis (y-axis) represents the value you are measuring. It's one of the most straightforward and powerful ways to visualize how a metric changes.
You use them all the time without even realizing it. For example, you might be tracking:
Monthly Sales: Are sales growing, declining, or flat? Are there spikes during certain holidays?
Daily Website Traffic: Did that marketing campaign cause a jump in visitors last week?
Weekly Customer Support Tickets: Do you need more staff on Mondays to handle the weekend backlog?
Quarterly Ad Spend: How does your spending correlate with revenue over the year?
The goal of a time series plot is to turn a raw table of dates and numbers into a clear story. It helps you quickly identify trends, seasonal patterns, and unusual spikes or dips that demand your attention. Looking at a table of 12 months of sales data is one thing, seeing it visualized as an upward-trending line makes the story instantly clear.
The Old-School Way: Creating a Time Series Plot in Excel, Step-by-Step
Excel is a powerful tool and is perfectly capable of creating beautiful time series plots. While the process has a few steps, it's a great skill for anyone who works with data. Let's walk through it using an example of tracking monthly website visitors.
Step 1: Organize Your Data Correctly
Your chart is only as good as the data feeding it. For a time series plot, Excel needs clean, organized source data. Here's how to set it up:
Create two columns: The first column should contain your time intervals (e.g., dates, months, years), and the second column should contain the corresponding values you want to measure (e.g., Visitors, Sales, Signups).
Ensure chronological order: Your dates or time periods must be sorted from oldest to newest.
Keep intervals consistent: Make sure your time periods are uniform, whether daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Mixing intervals will skew the chart.
For our example, your simple table would look like this:
Month | VisitorsJan-23 | 5,420Feb-23 | 5,980Mar-23 | 6,210Apr-23 | 7,150May-23 | 6,890Jun-23 | 7,540Jul-23 | 7,990Aug-23 | 8,230Sep-23 | 8,110Oct-23 | 9,050Nov-23 | 10,240Dec-23 | 11,500
Make sure Excel recognizes your first column as dates. If you just type text like "January," Excel might not sort it correctly in a timeline. Using date formats like "1/1/2023" is usually best.
Step 2: Insert the Line Chart
With your data prepped, creating the basic chart is easy. The best chart for a time series plot is almost always a line chart, as it visualizes the connection between data points over time.
Select your data: Drag your cursor to highlight both columns, including the headers ("Month" and "Visitors").
Navigate to the Insert tab: Go to the Excel ribbon at the top and click on Insert.
Choose a Line Chart: In the 'Charts' section, click the icon for 'Insert Line or Area Chart.' A dropdown menu will appear. For a classic time series plot, the best option is typically 'Line with Markers.' This chart type shows both the connecting line (the trend) and the individual data points for each month.
Excel will instantly generate a basic time series plot on your worksheet. It's a great start, but it's not yet a professional-grade visualization.
Step 3: Customize and Refine Your Plot
This is where you'll spend most of your time - turning that basic chart into a clear, readable story. It's what separates a quick-and-dirty graph from a professional report.
Add Chart Titles and Axis Labels
An untitled chart is useless. No one should have to guess what they're looking at.
Click on your chart to bring up the Chart Design tab.
On the far left, click "Add Chart Element."
Select "Chart Title" > "Above Chart." Give it a descriptive name like "Monthly Website Visitors -- 2023."
Go back to "Add Chart Element" > "Axis Titles." Add a Primary Vertical title (e.g., "Number of Visitors") and a Primary Horizontal title (e.g., "Month").
Add a Trendline to See the Bigger Picture
A trendline smoothes out the month-to-month fluctuations to show you the overall direction of your data. This is incredibly helpful for long-term analysis.
Again, click on the chart and go to "Add Chart Element."
Hover over "Trendline" and select "Linear."
A dotted line will appear across your chart, showing the general upward (or downward) trajectory of your data. This makes it instantly obvious that your website traffic is in a growth phase.
Format Your Axes for Clarity
Right now, your y-axis might start at 0, leaving a lot of empty white space at the bottom of your chart. You can make the changes more dramatic and easier to read by adjusting the axis bounds.
Right-click the vertical (Y) axis (the numbers on the left) and select "Format Axis."
A panel will appear on the right. Under "Axis Options," you can change the Minimum bound. Instead of 0, you could set it to 5,000 for our example data. This zooms in on the data you actually have, making the month-to-month changes more visible.
The Problem with the Manual Method
While the steps above work perfectly well, you can probably see the snags. The process is manual and can become a real drag, especially when your reporting needs grow.
It's Time-Consuming: For one quick chart, it's manageable. But what happens when you need five different time series plots for your weekly meeting? The cycle of downloading a CSV, cleaning the data, inserting the chart, and then meticulously formatting every title, label, and trendline adds up quickly. Those "quick reports" often eat up a few hours of the week.
It Requires Excel Know-How: Not everyone on your team is an Excel whiz. Many professionals spend their time hunting through menus to find the right options or looking up "how to add a trendline in Excel" on YouTube. Proficiency with a tool shouldn't be a barrier to getting answers from data.
The Charts are Static: When next month's data comes in, your beautifully formatted chart is already outdated. You have to go back in, manually expand the data range, and double-check that your formatting is still correct. It's not a "live" dashboard of your performance, it's a static snapshot from the last time you manually updated it.
It Discourages Deeper Questions: Once you've made your monthly visitors chart, you might naturally wonder, "How does this look by week?" or "Can I see traffic from the US versus Canada on the same plot?" With the manual method, each of these questions means starting a new, painstaking process from scratch. It puts a stop to curiosity and data exploration.
The AI-Powered Alternative: Create Time Series Plots with Natural Language
What if, instead of clicking through a dozen menu options, you could just ask for your chart? That's the idea behind modern AI-powered data tools. This approach flips the entire process on its head, moving from manual construction to simple conversation.
Here's how it works differently:
Connect Your Data Once: Instead of downloading CSVs every time you need a report, you connect your key data sources (like Google Analytics, Shopify, Salesforce, HubSpot, or even a Google Sheet) one time. The system then has direct, real-time access to your information.
Ask for What You Want: You use simple, plain English to describe the time series plot you need in your head. No technical jargon, no formulas, and no clicking.
Instead of the long manual process, you'd simply ask: "Show me a line chart of my monthly Shopify sales for the last 12 months."
Want to compare two trends? "Create a time series plot comparing website sessions from the US and Canada over the past quarter."
Need to get more granular? "Make a line graph with markers for new user signups per week for the last 90 days, and add a trendline."
Get an Instant, Interactive Plot: The AI translates your request and instantly generates a perfectly formatted, interactive time series plot. It's not a static image - it's a live visualization that you can hover over, filter, and modify with follow-up questions like, "Now change this to a bar chart" or "What was our biggest traffic day last month?"
The Benefits of a Modern Approach
Using AI isn't just about showing off fancy tech, it's about fundamentally improving how you work with data.
Speed: Go from a question to an insight in under 30 seconds instead of 20 minutes of Excel wrangling.
Accessibility: Anyone on your team can get data-driven answers, not just "the data person." If you can write an email, you can build a report. This removes the knowledge barrier that keeps many team members from making informed decisions.
Live Data: Your charts and dashboards are always up-to-date. When a sale comes through on Shopify, it's reflected in your report. You're always looking at today's reality, not last week's stale export.
Deep Exploration: Since getting a new chart is as simple as asking a new question, it encourages curiosity. You can freely follow an idea, drill down into an interesting spike, and understand an issue from multiple angles without feeling like you're creating more tedious work for yourself.
Final Thoughts
Creating a time series plot is a fundamental skill for anyone analyzing business performance over time. While Excel is a reliable workhorse for building these charts manually, the process is often slow, static, and requires a certain level of technical skill. Today, AI-powered tools offer a conversation-based approach that makes this type of data analysis faster and more accessible for everyone on a team.
At Graphed , we decided that getting insights shouldn't be a complex chore. We built our platform to eliminate the manual steps of downloading data and building charts from scratch. You can connect your marketing and sales data sources one time, and then just ask for what you need - like, "Create a time series plot of my website visitors versus sales this month." We handle creating the live, interactive visuals so you can focus on making smart decisions, not tinkering with chart settings.