Where can you find help when something in Excel has you stymied? You can use the built-in Excel help system. This sometimes is frustrating, because it doesn’t always find relevant information. But never fear, because there are many sources of information on the internet.
Google
My number one source for Excel and VBA help is Google. Type [...]

A visitor to my web site emailed me, asking how to make a nice chart like the one in Postcards from the ledge on The Economist’s web site. There is no default Excel chart type that comes anywhere close, and the person asking the question didn’t yet understand the breadth of Excel’s flexibility. I reproduce [...]

The information aesthetics blog described an interesting use for a pie chart: directing traffic. In marshalite alternative traffic light, there was a picture and short description.
“an alternative, rotary traffic signal designed by Charles Marshall in 1936 & used from the 1940s through 1970s in Australia. 2 rotors pointing at colored sections denote whether traffic in [...]

Excel highlights the data range of a chart under many conditions. The source data range must be relatively simple, based on a rectangular data range. The chart must be embedded in the worksheet that also contains the data. If the data meets these conditions (elaborated upon later), selecting the chart area or the plot area [...]

In Connect Two XY Series I showed how to use an extra XY series to connect two existing XY series in a chart. This shows how points in the first series may have changed to produce the data in the second series. A reader asked in a comment how to use arrows to more visually [...]

A visitor to my web site asks, “How can I connect corresponding points of two different XY series in a chart?”
In other words, how can this chart

be converted into into this chart

This is pretty easy by adding a third XY series that includes all of the data for the original two series. The data has [...]

In Line Chart vs. Step Chart I compared step charts to line charts, and presented a quick way to prepare data for making a step chart. My insightful colleague Derek pointed out that a similar chart with the horizontal segments only, and with vertical segments (risers) hidden, may be a more effective display method, because [...]

A reader named Roland asks, “How can I individually format the labels on my category axis?”

Recently in the Flowing Data blog, Nathan Yau wrote U.S. Census Bureau’s 2008 Statistical Abstract - Looking at America’s Data. Interesting, now I can look up anything and take on Cliff Clavin.
Nathan included a chart showing how the price of first class postage stamps had increased over the years. In a comment I noted that [...]

In VBA to Split Data Range into Multiple Chart Series I shared a VBA procedure that split a range into separate series in a chart. In fact, this is fairly easy to do using conditional chart formatting techniques I describe on my web site (see Simple Conditional Charts). The way these techniques work is to [...]