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Choosing chart types

Choosing chart types - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel 2010 Essential Training

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Choosing chart types

Charts are great tools for data analysis and Excel has a very robust charting package built-in. You also might not always know which chart to use for which purpose. First of all, why even use a chart? Well, which is easier to understand? Dry data like this or a colorful column chart like this? Now column charts are great when you have a lot of data to look at. And let's take a look at this chart here. We can see right off the bat that three states here, Maryland, Vermont and New York, usually have fairly high numbers. But something happened in this second quarter where Vermont and New York still have high numbers but something happened to Maryland where the numbers aren't quite so high. On the other hand, New Jersey usually has some kind of mid-level numbers but also in the second quarter something happened where New Jersey has higher numbers than usual. Now this chart doesn't tell us why it happened but it does make those numbers stand out. Excel also creates pie charts, and pie…

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