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Creating Professional Charts In MS Excel

By admin on October 5th, 2011

Is it possible to build professional-looking and flexible charts in Excel in accordance with state-of-the-art chart rules and individual corporate design specifications? Yes it is! Certainly this cannot be achieved by just using the standard charts and pre-set layouts provided by the tool. However when combining several different chart types in one chart and with a bit of clean-up work, Excel can deliver amazing results.

The advantage of using Excel for chart design is the fact that almost every windows user has it and most ERP systems provide respective export functionality. So why should we be using another reporting system when data is already available in xls-format? This is especially true for small and medium size companies. Larger corporations might have sufficient funds and resources to buy and maintain more sophisticated reporting tools. The implementation of such software however may result in significant project management work, license fees, maintenance cost and training requirements.

So let’s make use of the various options that Excel provides before heading towards the purchase of an expensive reporting tool. Even advanced Excel users typically haven’t explored more than twenty percent of what Excel actually can do.

When trying to efficiently use Excel as a controlling and reporting tool, users should first make themselves familiar with the more than two hundred functions that Excel provides. By applying and combining functions like VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, INDEX, IF, SUMIF, COUNTIF, MAX, MIN, ISERROR or OFFSET in a smart way, the extraction of relevant data out of a large, unformatted data table should become an easy task. The extracted data, which is supposed to feed the chart later, should either be located on a separate worksheet or on the worksheet where the chart will be created but never on the same sheet where the source data sits.

In a second step the extracted data should be formatted in the way we want to display it in the chart. Functions like ROUND, TRIM or CLEAN might be of help as well as the proper use of the various number formats provided by Excel. Custom formats can be defined in case the standard does not supply us with what is needed.

The final step would then be to create the actual chart by selecting an applicable chart type and assigning the extracted and formatted data. However not all of the chart types provided by Excel are actually usable in real life. Focus should be on column charts, bar charts, line charts and XY scatter charts. Pie charts, area charts and bubble charts might also make sense in certain areas. Other types should not be used.

Key for building a professional chart with condensed content is the combination of different chart types in one chart. The most common combination is probably the mix of a column chart with a line or an XY chart. The column chart typically represents the main graphical item. Line and XY charts can be used for showing a secondary axis, labels or legends. The best way of displaying additional elements in any chart is the use of an XY scatter chart. The advantage of this chart type is the fact that it can be positioned at any point in the chart area by selecting the respective values for the X- and Y axes. This attribute makes the XY chart the most powerful chart type although it is normally not the main graphical item in a chart set.

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