Visio® 2007 Bible

Chapter 13. Constructing Charts and Graphs

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Choosing the right chart and graph template

• Exploring chart and graph shapes

• Creating 2-D and 3-D bar graphs

• Drawing line graphs

• Adding labels to axes

• Building pie charts

• Comparing product features

• Working with marketing diagram shapes

• Adding text to charts and graphs

• Working with extendable and stackable shapes

Charts and graphs illustrate quantitative results and trends, such as financial performance, marketing analysis, or statistical distributions. Microsoft Visio and Microsoft Excel both offer features for constructing charts and graphs, so your first decision is the program that offers the best tools for the charting job at hand. In most cases, Excel is better than Visio for developing and formatting charts.

If the data you want to present is already stored in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, there's no need to look any further than the Insert Chart command in Excel. You can format every component of an Excel chart to achieve exactly the look you want.

However, Visio 2007 has simplified connecting Visio shapes with data from one or more data sources (as described in Chapter 10), making it the perfect solution if you're developing a presentation that summarizes data from a variety of sources.

The Visio Charts and Graphs template includes shapes for common chart and graph styles, such as bar graphs, line graphs, pie charts, distribution curves, feature comparison tables, and other kinds of tabular information. In addition, you can use ...