When you’re creating data in Microsoft Excel using charts and graphs can make the relationship between the numbers easier to see by turning them into shapes. Viewers can compare these shapes to each other for a quick snapshot of the idea you’re trying to convey and they can be prompted to ask questions or draw a conclusion about what they see.

Microsoft Excel comes with dozens of chart styles built in, so you have a lot of flexibility on how to present the information. I’m going to use this simple table to illustrate a few options. First, you need to select the data by highlighting the values that you want to include in the chart.

Excel is pretty intuitive and you just need to make sure that you don’t select any fields that aren’t relevant to your chart. Now, you’re going to select the insert tab on the top navigation bar and look for the group for charts. You can click the arrow beneath any of the chart styles to see all the options for that style.

As you can see Excel offers a virtual smorgasbord of charts, lines, bars, columns, pies. There are even more here under other charts so I’m just going to pick one of the chart styles that I think will work well for this information. How about a bar chart?

You can always drag the corner of the image to make it bigger if you want to see the information more clearly and it’s always a good idea to save your document as you go along especially before you start making any changes to your chart.

Now when you select the chart you can see in the navigation at the top that you have three new tables under the heading chart tools, design, layout and format. You can use these different features to customize the look of your chart or change what type of chart it is.

One of the most common tools is under the design tab to move chart. You can do a couple of neat things here. First, if you want the chart to be on a separate worksheet which is essentially a separate page within the same file or workbook, select the option for new sheet and give the sheet a name then click OK.

Now, you’ve got a new sheet that has nothing but your great, big chart. If you decide you don’t want them at the separate worksheet, you can choose the other move chart option which lets you inset the chart as a graphic. You can move it back to the original worksheet or place it in the different worksheet.

I’m going to tell it to put this chart back on sheet one, so I’ll choose the object in option and select sheet one from the pull down menu and there’s our chart again. There’s plenty you can do with charts in Microsoft Excel especially when it comes to adding titles in different design elements, so take sometime to play around with the chart tools and see what you can create.