Office 2007 Bible

Chapter 23. Working with Tables and Charts

In This Chapter

Creating a new table Moving around in a table Selecting rows, columns, and cells Editing a table’s structure Applying table Quick Styles Formatting table cells Understanding charts Starting a new chart Working with chart data Chart types and chart layout presets Working with labels Controlling the axes Formatting a chart

You can type tabular data—in other words, data in a grid of rows and columns—directly into a table. You also can apply formatting that makes tabular data easier to read and more attractive.

When you need to present data in a graphical format that’s easy to understand, PowerPoint’s charting tool is perfect for this purpose. The new PowerPoint 2007 charting interface is based upon the one in Excel, and so you don’t have to leave PowerPoint to create, modify, and format professional-looking charts.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to create and manage PowerPoint tables and how to create charts that present numeric data in a visual format.

Note

What’s the difference between a chart and a graph? Some purists will tell you that a chart is either a table or a pie chart, whereas a graph is a chart that plots data points on two axes, such as a bar chart. However, Microsoft does not make this distinction, and neither do I in this chapter. I use the term “chart” in this chapter for either kind.