Fun and Functional Excel Charts Six Ways To Make Even Bad Business Numbers Look Good Helen Bradley
Wed 3/6/02 -- Excel charts must be accurate, but they don’t have to be boring. Microsoft's spreadsheet has so many great charting tools that there’s simply no excuse for data that doesn't jump off the page and grab your viewers' attention. So whether you’re printing your charts, adding them to a PowerPoint show, or publishing them on the Web, here’s how to make them sing.
Custom chart backdrops. Use a photo as the background for either the Chart Area or Plot Area to give your graph a more professional look. When choosing an image, be aware you can use only one located on your hard disk in a variety of formats -- you can't paste an image from the Clipboard or use certain clip art formats, though you can paste an image into your graphics software, save it as a BMP file, and use that. You may need to increase the image's brightness and decrease its contrast to wash it out so the chart can be seen over it.
To add the backdrop in Excel, select the chart or plot area, right-click, and choose Format Chart Area (or Plot Area). Choose the Patterns tab, Fill Effects button, then Picture tab; choose Select Picture; locate the image and click Insert, then OK twice.
Cones, cylinders, and pyramids. Instead of using bars and columns for your charts, why not try something out of the ordinary? Click any chart created using the Chart Wizard, and on the Step 1 dialog's Standard Types tab, you'll find Cylinder, Cone, and Pyramid styles. There's even a 3D Cones option on the Custom Types tab.
If your data appears as a single series (so your cones form an unattractive line), break the data into multiple series to create a three-dimensional "field" of cones. Remove the floor and axes and replace with Data Labels for a more visually appealing effect.
One slice to go. If you've ever seen a pie chart with small pieces of data squashed together into an unreadable mess, you'll love Pie of a Pie and Bar of a Pie. These chart subtypes let you amalgamate the small pieces into a single slice, which is subdivided in a second pie or bar chart. This gives you the best of both worlds -- the simplicity of a pie chart and the ability to read small data items more accurately.
After selecting this chart type, choose Format/Selected Data Series and the Options tab. You can then select the segments displayed in the second chart by value, percent, or position, or choose Custom to drag slices from the main pie to the second chart with your mouse.
Replacing bars with pictures. Perhaps the most exciting effect you can create in Excel charts is to replace the usual bars or columns with pictographs or images stacked to the appropriate height. Better still, it's easy to do.
Begin by preparing your images. You can choose to use a single image, one image in different colors, or different images for each bar. Use your graphics software to adjust the images' colors, make them the same size, and save them to disk. Using a bar or column chart, select the first bar or column to replace -- you can choose an entire series or just a single bar.
Right-click and choose Format Data Series (or Format Data Point), the Patterns tab, Fill Effects, and the Picture tab. Choose Select Picture, locate your image and choose Insert, then check the Stack option button and click OK twice. Repeat for the remaining series.
What data is this? For many charts, you'll find you need to include the data with the chart -- having it appear on the same worksheet just isn't enough. When this is the case, you can add a data table to the chart that displays the information being plotted. Then, wherever the chart goes, the data does too.
To add a data table, choose Chart/Chart Options and the Data Table tab. Enable the "Show data table" checkbox and the "Show legend" keys to add an indicator to the table which corresponds with the data in the chart.
Use pictures as points. Although there's no formal option to add images to a line chart, you can do it with a simple workaround. Begin with a column chart and add images in place of the columns, then change the chart type to a line chart. The line chart will display a single version of each image at each plot point on the chart. To make best use of this effect, start with a small image (say, 90 to 100 pixels in width).
