Excel Scientific and Engineering Cookbook

Chapter 4. Charting

Introduction

Excel has built-in support for preparing a wide variety of charts , including custom charts, in your spreadsheet. You can even copy charts you create and embed them in Word documents. Charting is a handy data visualization technique that may provide valuable insight into the experimental or calculated data you may be trying to analyze. Excel makes charting quick and easy, and provides a great deal of flexibility in customizing your charts. Excel’s charting capabilities are not as sophisticated as those of some specialized scientific data visualization applications, but in many cases Excel may be the fastest way to visualize data. This is especially true if you’re generating your data in Excel via calculations or if you have already imported your data into Excel using techniques discussed in Chapter 3.

4.1. Creating Simple Charts

Problem

You’ve imported or generated data and you’d like to plot your data for further analysis.

Solution

Use Excel’s built-in charting features. Select the data you want to plot. Then select Insert → Chart...from the main menu bar to launch the Chart Wizard . Now let the wizard walk you through the rest of the chart-creation process.

Discussion

Let’s walk through an example to illustrate the basic steps involved in creating a chart in Excel. Figure 4-1 shows the data we’ll use in this example.

The data consists of two columns. The first column contains heading angles in degrees and the second contains wind force in kilo-pounds (kips) ...