Excel® 2013 Absolute Beginner’s Guide

11. Creating Charts and Sparklines

In This Chapter

• Quickly add a chart to a sheet.

• Create a chart mixing bars and lines.

• Make a pie chart easier to read.

• Insert sparklines into a report.

Charts are a great way to graphically portray data. They’re a quick and simple way to emphasize trends in data. Some people prefer to look at them instead of trying to make sense of rows and columns of numbers. Excel offers two methods of charting data—charts and sparklines. Charts, which you are most likely familiar with, are large graphics with a title and numbers and/or text along the left and bottom. Sparklines are miniature charts in cells with only markers to represent the data. This chapter provides you with the tools to create simple, but useful, ...