Excel offers a great many different chart types. Many of these are 3D types, which should be left off the palette of any serious data technician. Here is a simple cross-tab table of data, showing how the strength of an experimental alloy varies as a function of alloy chemical composition and test temperature. In a [...]

Excel 2010 Chart Type Dialog Excel offers a wide range of standard chart types. Below is the Chart Type dialog from Excel 2010, but all of these standard chart types have been available since Excel 97, and most of them since before that. What makes my dialog different is that it has been annotated to [...]

Excel has built-in chart types for clustered columns and bars, and for stacked columns and bars. One of the commonest charting questions in online Excel forums is, “How do I make a chart that is both clustered and stacked?” This article demonstrates a protocol that works in both modern versions of Excel, that is, Excel [...]

Waterfall charts are commonly used in business to show how a value changes from one state to another through a series of intermediate changes. For example, you can project next year’s profit or cash flow starting with this year’s value, and showing the up and down effects of changing costs, revenues, and other inputs. Waterfall [...]

Box and Whisker Charts (Box Plots) are commonly used in the display of statistical analyses. Microsoft Excel does not have a built in Box and Whisker chart type, but you can create your own custom Box and Whisker charts, using stacked bar or column charts and error bars. This tutorial shows how to make box [...]

In Bar Chart Value Axis Scale Must Include Zero, I took Microsoft to task (again) for cutting off the bars in their bar charts. This is a reproduction of their plot comparing power consumption of various browsers while only viewing a blank page. Because the bottoms of the bars have been excised, the values they [...]