Chapter 11. Creating Charts and Graphics

11. Creating Charts and Graphics

Chapter at a Glance

In this chapter, you will learn to:
	Create charts.
	Customize the appearance of charts.
	Find trends in your data.
	Create dynamic charts using PivotCharts.
	Create diagrams by using SmartArt.

When you enter data into a Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007 worksheet, you create a record of important events, whether they are individual sales, sales for an hour of a day, or the price of a product. What a list of values in cells can't communicate easily, however, is the overall trends in the data. The best way to communicate trends in a large collection of data is by creating a chart, which summarizes data visually.

You have a great deal of control over your charts' appearanceyou can change the color of any chart element, choose a different chart type to better summarize the underlying data, and change the display properties of text and numbers in a chart. If the data in the worksheet used to create a chart represents a progression through time, such as sales over a number of months, you can have Office Excel 2007 extrapolate future sales and add a trend line to the graph representing that prediction.

Just as you can create PivotTable® dynamic views to reorganize a data list dynamically, you can create a PivotChart® dynamic view that reflects the contents and organization of the associated PivotTable. You can also create diagrams, such as organizational charts, that are useful in many organizations.

In this chapter, you'll learn how to create a chart and customize its elements, find trends in your overall data, create dynamic charts, and create and format diagrams.

See Also

Do you need only a quick refresher on the topics in this chapter? See the Quick Reference entries on pages xxviilxiii.

Important

Before you can use the practice sites provided for this chapter, you need to install them from the book's companion CD to their default location. See "Using the Book's CD" on page xiii for more information.