Excel Creating Charts and Conditional Formatting

A picture is worth of thousand words; a chart is worth of thousand sets of data. In this tutorial, we are going to learn how we can use charts in Excel to visualize our data.

What is a chart?

A chart is a visual representative of data in both columns and rows. Charts are usually used to analyse trends and patterns in data sets. Let's say you have been recording the sales figures in Excel for the past three years. Using charts, you can easily tell which year had the most sales and which year had the least. You can also use charts to compare set targets against actual achievements.

We will use the following data for this tutorial.

Note: we will be using Excel 2013. If you have a lower version, then some of the more advanced features may not be available to you.

Item	2012	2013	2014	2015
Desktop Computers	20	12	13	12
Laptops	34	45	40	39
Monitors	12	10	17	15
Printers	78	13	90	14

Types of charts

Different scenarios require different types of charts. Towards this end, Excel provides a number of chart types that you can work with. The type of chart that you choose depends on the type of data that you want to visualize. To help simplify things for the users, Excel 2013 and above has an option that analyses your data and makes a recommendation of the chart type that you should use.

The following table shows some of the most commonly used charts and when you should consider using them.

S/N	CHART TYPE	WHEN SHOULD I USE IT?	EXAMPLE
1	Pie Chart	When you want to quantify items and show them as percentages.
2	Bar Chart	When you want to compare values across a few categories. The values run horizontally
3	Colum chart	When you want to compare values across a few categories. The values run vertically
4	Line chart	When you want to visualize trends over a period of time i.e. months, days, years, etc.
5	Combo Chart	When you want to highlight different types of information

The importance of charts

Allows you to visualize data graphically
It's easier to analyse trends and patterns in the charts
Easy to interpret compared to data in cells

Step by step example of creating charts in Excel

In this tutorial, we are going to create a simple column chart that will display the sold quantities against the sales year.

Open Excel
Enter the data from the sample data table above
Your workbook should now look as follows

To get the desired chart you have to follow the following steps

Select the data you want to represent in graph
Click on INSERT tab from the ribbon
Click on the Column chart drop down button
Select the chart type you want

You should be able to see the following chart

Tutorial Exercise

When you select the chart, the ribbon activates the following tab

Try to apply the different chart styles, and other options presented in your chart.

Conditional Formatting

As the name suggests, conditional formatting refers to formatting that is only applied when the specified condition is true. Let's say we want to easily fetch the sales figures greater than 30. We can use conditional formatting to highlight all the sales figures that are greater than 30.

Highlight all the sales figures as shown below