Excel 2016 Formulas

Chapter 17 Charting Techniques

In This Chapter

• Understanding how a chart’s SERIES formula works
• Plotting functions with one and two variables
• Creating awesome designs with formulas
• Working with linear and nonlinear trendlines
• Using new forecasting functions
• Useful charting examples that demonstrate key concepts

When most people think of Excel, they think of analyzing rows and columns of numbers. As you probably know already, though, Excel is no slouch when it comes to presenting data visually in the form of a chart. In fact, it’s a safe bet that Excel is the most commonly used software for creating charts.

After you create a chart, you have almost complete control over nearly every aspect of each chart. This chapter, which assumes that you’re familiar with Excel’s charting features, demonstrates some useful charting techniques—most of which involve formulas.

Understanding the SERIES Formula

You create charts from numbers that appear in a worksheet. You can enter these numbers directly, or you can derive them as the result of formulas. Normally, the data used by a chart resides in a single worksheet, within one file, but that’s not a strict requirement. A single chart can use data from any number of worksheets or even from different workbooks.

A chart consists of one or more data series, and each data series appears as a line, column, bar, and so on. Each series in a chart has a SERIES formula. When you select a data series in a chart, Excel highlights the worksheet data ...