What Do You Use to Create a Chart in Excel?

Creating a chart in Excel is one of the most effective ways to make sense of your data, transforming rows of numbers into a clear visual story. Instead of getting bogged down in theory, this guide will walk you through the practical tools Excel offers, from one-click recommendations to fully custom charts. You'll learn the core methods for creating visualizations and the simple steps to make them look professional and easy to understand.

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Start Here: The "Insert" Tab is Your Charting Command Center

Your journey into Excel charting always begins in the same place: the Insert tab on the ribbon. This is the central hub where you'll find all the tools needed to bring your data to life. When you click on it, you'll see a section prominently labeled "Charts."

This "Charts" group is more than just a collection of icons, it's a library of data storytelling tools. Excel neatly categorizes them to help you find the right fit for your numbers:

• Column or Bar Charts: Perfect for comparing values across different categories, like sales figures for different products or website traffic from various channels.
• Line or Area Charts: The best choice for showing trends over time, such as monthly revenue, weekly website sessions, or daily ad spend.
• Pie or Doughnut Charts: Use these to show the proportions of a whole, like the percentage breakdown of marketing budget by channel or market share between competitors.
• Hierarchy Charts (Treemap, Sunburst): Ideal for visualizing data with complex parent-child relationships.
• Statistic Charts (Histogram, Box & Whisker): Used for understanding the statistical distribution of your data.
• Scatter (X, Y) or Bubble Charts: Great for showing the relationship or correlation between two sets of numerical data.
• Waterfall or Stock Charts: Specialized charts for financial analysis or visualizing how an initial value is affected by a series of positive and negative changes.
• Combo Charts: These allow you to combine two different chart types, like a column chart and a line chart, to show different kinds of data in one view. A classic example is plotting sales revenue (columns) against profit margin (a line) for each month.

Before you dive into manually creating charts, however, there's a feature you absolutely need to know about.

Pressed for Time? Use "Recommended Charts"

If you're unsure which chart type best represents your data, or you just want to create a quality visualization quickly, Excel’s "Recommended Charts" feature is your new best friend. It analyzes the structure of your selected data and suggests a handful of chart types that it thinks will be most effective.

Think of it as having a data analyst looking over your shoulder and offering smart suggestions. It saves you time and often prevents you from choosing a chart type that isn’t a good fit for your numbers (like using a pie chart to show a trend over time).

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How to Use Recommended Charts:

Let's walk through it with a simple, common example: monthly sales figures for the first half of the year.

1. Organize Your Data: First, make sure your data is in a simple table format with clear headers. Good organization is the foundation of any good chart.

Month   | Sales
--------|--------
January | $15,000
February| $18,500
March   | $22,000
April   | $21,000
May     | $25,500
June    | $24,000

2. Select Your Data: Click and drag your mouse to highlight the entire data set, including the "Month" and "Sales" headers. Including the headers is important because Excel will use them to automatically label your chart's axes and legend.

3. Click "Recommended Charts": With your data selected, navigate to the Insert tab and click the Recommended Charts button. A new window will pop up.

4. Review the Suggestions: In the "Recommended Charts" window, Excel will display several chart previews on the left-hand side. For our sales data, it will likely suggest a Line Chart (excellent for showing trends over time) and a Column Chart (also good for comparing values for each month). You can click on each suggestion to see a larger preview.

5. Choose and Insert: Once you find a chart that tells the story you want, select it and click OK. Excel will instantly insert the fully-formed chart directly into your worksheet. Just like that, you've gone from raw data to a professional-looking visualization in a few clicks.

Creating a Chart Manually: Taking Full Control

While Recommended Charts is fantastic, there are times you'll know exactly which chart type you want or need to build something more specific. The manual process is just as straightforward and gives you complete control from the start.

Let’s use the same sales data, but this time we will manually create a column chart.

Step-by-Step Manual Creation:

1. Select Your Data: As before, highlight the table, including the headers. This step is always your starting point.

2. Choose a Specific Chart Type: Go to the Insert tab. In the "Charts" section, instead of clicking "Recommended Charts," find the chart type you want. In this case, find the icon for "Insert Column or Bar Chart."

3. Select a Sub-Type: When you click the icon, a dropdown menu will appear with different variations. You'll see options like 2-D Column, 3-D Column, 2-D Bar, etc. The "Clustered Column" is the most standard and widely used format, so let's choose that one.

4. Your Chart Appears: Excel immediately inserts the column chart onto your sheet. It uses your headers ("Month" and "Sales") to automatically create the horizontal axis labels and the chart title. The numeric values determine the height of each column.

Whether you use the recommended or manual method, the next step is the most important: making the chart clear, readable, and tailored to your audience.

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How to Customize Your Excel Chart

A default chart is a great starting point, but customization turns it into a powerful communication tool. When you select your chart, two new tabs will appear on the ribbon: Chart Design and Format. These tabs, along with the small icons that pop up next to the chart itself, are your control panel for every element of the visualization.

Let's focus on the three small buttons that appear on the top right side of your selected chart, as they offer the most common and user-friendly options.

1. Chart Elements (the '+' symbol)

This is where you add or remove key components of your chart to add context and clarity.

• Chart Title: Your chart should always have a clear, descriptive title. Click this box and then double-click the "Chart Title" on the chart to edit it. Change it from "Sales" to something more specific, like "Monthly Sales Performance (H1)."
• Axis Titles: Essential for readability. Check this box to add titles for your horizontal (X-axis) and vertical (Y-axis). You can then edit them on the chart to say "Month" and "Sales Revenue ($)." No one should have to guess what your numbers mean.
• Data Labels: Sometimes you want to show the exact value for each bar or point on your line. Check this box to add the numbers directly onto the chart, which can save your audience from having to estimate values based on the axis.
• Legend: This is crucial when you're plotting more than one data series (e.g., "2023 Sales" vs. "2024 Sales"). The legend tells the viewer what each color or pattern represents.
• Gridlines: These are the horizontal lines that run across the plot area. You can remove them for a cleaner look or add more detailed ones (minor gridlines) for more precise reading.

2. Chart Styles (the paintbrush symbol)

This button is your shortcut to making your chart look great without messing with individual formatting options. It offers two tabs:

• Style: Browse through a gallery of professionally designed themes. Some add drop shadows, others change the background color, and some use more modern-looking bar styles. It’s an easy way to match the chart to the look and feel of a report or presentation.
• Color: Here, you can change the color palette of your chart with one click. Excel offers various monochromatic and multicolored schemes. Instead of manually changing each bar's color, you can apply a consistent, visually appealing scheme instantly.

3. Chart Filters (the funnel symbol)

This incredibly useful tool lets you temporarily hide certain data from your chart without deleting it from your source table. Imagine your sales chart also included data for July. If you only wanted to present the first half of the year, you could click the filter icon, uncheck the box for July, and click "Apply." The chart would instantly update, hiding that data point. This is perfect for interactive presentations and on-the-fly analysis.

Going Further: PivotCharts and Sparklines

Once you've mastered the basics, there are two more tools in Excel's charting toolkit that can elevate your reporting from static to dynamic.

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PivotCharts: For Interactive Data Exploration

A PivotChart isn't just a chart, it's a visualization that is directly linked to a PivotTable. This means your chart is fully interactive. When you filter, sort, or rearrange the PivotTable, your PivotChart updates in real-time. This is perfect for analyzing larger datasets or when you want to explore your data from different angles.

To create one, go to Insert > PivotChart. You can then drag and drop fields from your data list (e.g., Product, Region, Sales, Date) into the different PivotTable areas to build your analysis dynamically. As you move fields, the chart automatically rebuilds itself. It’s the closest thing to an interactive dashboard you can build directly inside Excel.

Sparklines: Tiny Charts Inside a Cell

What if you want to show a trend for dozens of line items but don't want to create 50 separate charts? Meet Sparklines. A Sparkline is a mini-chart that lives within a single cell and visualizes the data from a single row.

To use them:

1. Click the cell where you want the Sparkline to appear.
2. Go to Insert > Sparklines and choose Line or Column.
3. Select the row of data you want to visualize (e.g., sales figures from Jan to Jun for a single product).
4. Click OK.

A tiny trendline will appear in the cell. You can then drag the fill handle down to instantly create a Sparkline for every row in your table, getting a quick, high-level view of individual trends at a glance.

Final Thoughts

Excel offers an incredibly robust set of tools for creating charts, from the effortless assistance of Recommended Charts to the complete manual control of the Insert tab. By starting with a well-organized data table, choosing the right chart type, and using the simple customization options, you can turn any spreadsheet into a compelling visual report. And for more complex analysis, PivotCharts and Sparklines add a layer of dynamic exploration that brings your data to life.

While Excel is fantastic for detailed analyses, getting insights often requires pulling data from various sources and building reports from scratch. We built Graphed to automate this process. Instead of manually exporting CSVs from Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and Shopify to wrangle in a spreadsheet, you can connect your accounts in seconds and simply describe the dashboard you want in plain English. Graphed handles the rest, creating real-time charts and reports so you can focus on making decisions, not on building reports.