Creating a New Chart in Excel
Viewing tip: Press the 'Play' button, and then the 'Fullscreen' button on the right.
Why should you create a chart?
Although a table provides you with an easy way to organize information, unless you examine it with close attention you will find it hard to notice general trends and draw conclusions out of it. As a rule of thumb, when presenting your results, you don’t want to deal with too much text and numbers.
Look for example at the table in the accompanying video. What do you see?
If you are like most people you see a grade sheet for Danny, Lisa, and Adam, in Math and English.
But what will you see after creating a chart from this table?
You will probably notice that you can say a lot more about that same data faster.
You will see for example that Danny has higher grades than Adam, but lower than Lisa, and you will probably easily notice that all of the students did better in English than they did in Math.
Psychologists have determined that our brains comprehend visual information up to 60,000x faster than they do text.
Remember: One chart is worth a thousand words!