In Make a Copied Chart Link to New Data I showed how to copy one sheet with data and a chart, or a data sheet and another sheet with a chart, so that the new chart links to the new data. The protocol is more complicated than you would expect the first time you get [...]

I showed in Easier Interactive Multiple Line Chart and in Gas Prices – Interactive Time Series how to use a listbox to highlight a particular series. This keeps its alignment, but also won’t work on a chart sheet.
In Chart Event to Highlight a Series, I showed how to use a chart legend plus chart events [...]

There are many reasons to add data to an Excel chart. Your data may not be ideally arranged to plot it all in one selection. You may decide after the fact to include more information. You may have received another month’s data to plot. You may be adding dummy data to generate some of the [...]

ProBlogger.net recently polled its readers, to see which blog platforms were most common, and published the results in What Blogging Platforms Do We Use?
I use self-hosted WordPress, called WordPress.org in the ProBlogger results. WordPress is by far the most popular platform, with loads of features and thousands of third-party plugins, and I find it  interesting [...]

When plotting data in a line or XY chart, it can be very deceptive to use the Smoothed Lines option. Here is a sample XY chart with dummy data, that has smoothed lines, and no markers to help decode the shape of the data.

It’s hardly a better infographic than a kid using chalk on the [...]

In Chart Source Data Highlighting I described the highlighting that displays the source data range of a chart and enables adjustment of this range without entering dialogs and editing the series formula. When the chart is embedded in the same sheet that contains its data, the data range is highlighted with up to three rectangular [...]

There is a handy feature of Excel that makes it easier to manipulate the source data of a chart. When the chart is embedded in the same sheet that contains its data, and the data range is “well-formed” (I’ll define this later), the data range is highlighted with up to three rectangular outlines.
This highlighting is [...]

When you create a stacked column chart, the columns are stacked in the order that the series are added to the chart. When the simple data shown below is plotted, Series A is on the bottom, Series B is stacked on A, and C is stacked on B. This order disregards the individual values of [...]

Is it time for another post about the ubiquitous pie chart? Sure!
Recent questions in various online forums

I want to use labels instead of a legend around my pie chart to make it easier to see which slice goes with which category. Sometimes these labels overlap each other in areas where the values are small. Is [...]

Jan Schultink shows that effective charting practices work in PowerPoint as well, in his Chart make-over example on Slides that Stick. He gives an example taken from some financial data from Skype.
Here is the original slide: