Results for:
charting

• Go beyond the basic chart type

  22 Feb 2012

  Lots and lots of you want to brush up on your Excel skills by going beyond creating basic charts. How do we know? Because so many of you click this page. Today, we're moving it back to the top of our home page to make it easier for you to find. Excel comes with lots of chart types, including column,...
• Line or scatter chart?

  30 Aug 2011

  That's a good question! Choosing the wrong chart type for your data can easily happen when it comes to line and scatter charts. They look very similar, especially when a scatter chart is displayed with connecting lines, but there is a big difference in the way each of these chart types plots data along...
• Apollo 11 & Excel – How did we do that?

  10 Aug 2011

  Today's post is brought to you by Sam Radakovitz, a program manager on the Office User Experience team. Thanks for all the support and kind words for our History Reimagined video series . We had a great time making these videos, especially the one about Excel 2010 and Apollo 11 . :-) After we posted...
• Create Convincing Visualizations by Adding Reference Lines to Your Excel Charts

  21 Jul 2011

  Today’s blog post is brought to you by Cathy Harley a Program Manager on the Excel Chart team. Have you ever wanted to add a horizontal or vertical line to your chart to indicate a key value, sales threshold, important date, or the average of your data? Are you looking to impress managers and convince...
• Free training: Take the next steps in growing your Excel skills

  28 Jun 2011

  In early May, we told you about the new video series Excel Skills Builder in our post " Take the first step in growing your Excel skills ." In that post, we announced the launch of lesson 1. Well, we've finally finished the rest of the lessons, and wanted to share this great resource with you! As a reminder...
• Format column sparkline charts using the date axis and cell merging

  1 Mar 2011

  Sparkline charts are great, but there may be times they need a little visual massaging to maximize their usefulness. Consider this scenario: You have a system for which you want to track downtime over the course of a year and (fortunately) it had downtime events in only four of twelve months. Here's...
• Can’t find the Chart Wizard? No worries

  7 Dec 2010

  Going, going, gone! Yes, it’s true that the Chart Wizard was removed from the product when we shipped Excel 2007, and we didn’t bring it back in Excel 2010. For those of you upgrading from Excel 97-2003, this may come as a big shock. The Chart Wizard provided a useful four-step process that...
• Hover Charts

  11 Mar 2010

  Thanks to Dan Battagin for writing this blog post. OK, so I'm sure everyone knows about the Freeze Panes feature in Excel - it's been around forever, and it's pretty useful in certain circumstances where you want to keep a row (or more) of data at the top of the sheet, or column on the side of the sheet...
• Scatter charts with PowerPivot

  24 Feb 2010

  Rob over at http://powerpivotpro.com has a interesting post on scatter charts and PowerPivot: At right is a list of all chart types in Excel. But not all of them are supported as PivotCharts. Try to use XY (Scatter), Bubble, or Stock as a PivotChart, and you’ll get an alert saying you cannot create it...
• Excel Add-In for Manipulating Points on Charts (MPOC)

  2 Nov 2009

  Overview In Excel 2007, the ability to directly resize or reposition points on the chart was deprecated. This feature was sometimes referred to as "Graphical Goal Seek." For example, in Excel 2003 a user could click on a data point in a column chart twice which would surface handles that could be used...
• More Charting Enhancements in Excel 2010

  25 Aug 2009

  I’m back from my vacation (boy, Seattle is really gorgeous during the summer!). Thanks to Sam Radakovitz (Sam Rad) for filling in for me while I was out. And thanks to Ben Rampson and Robin Wakefield for putting together this final post on charting improvements in Excel 2010. In this post I’ll walk through...
• Improvements to Chart Performance

  20 Aug 2009

  Thanks to Ben Rampson for putting this post together. In today’s article I will outline some of the significant new chart improvements that impact performance. In Office 2007 the graphics engine used by Office Charts was replaced with one that could support more complex rendering. A downside of this...
• Chart Object Model in Word & PowerPoint

  18 Aug 2009

  Over the next three posts this blog will cover some of the charting changes that have been made in Office 2010, many of which are the direct result of customer feedback. As part of the Office 2007 release we overhauled charting throughout Office; however an OM for Word and PowerPoint was not provided...
• How to Create a Professional Chart using Excel 2007

  24 Feb 2009

  Today's author, Robin Wakefield, a Program Manager on the Excel team, discusses charts. As a new program manager in Excel one of my first tasks was to understand what problems users encounter when building professional charts in Excel. I defined professional as following the principles of Edward Tufte...
• Chart Advisor

  25 Sep 2008

  Today's author, Scott Ruble, a Program Manager on the Excel team, is seeking feedback on a new prototype for building charts. When Office 2007 was released, one of the strong pieces of feedback was Excel needs to do a better job guiding users in the proper selection of charts to effectively communicate...
• Shadows on Charts and Cells in Excel 2007

  28 Mar 2008

  Today's author, Helen Hosein, a Program Manager on the Excel team. Certain shadows created in Excel 2003 look different Excel 2007. In particular, you might notice that your old cell shadows, as well as shadows on things like Chart Titles might look a bit different when you open your workbooks in Excel...
• Chart Templates

  21 Feb 2008

  Today's author, Ben Rampson, a Program Manager on the Excel team. Customers who author charts in presentations and reports often spend a significant amount of effort modifying their charts to get them looking just the way they want. While the new Chart Style and Chart Layout features in Office 2007 provide...
• Integrating Excel (Services) and PowerPoint with the Microsoft SDK for Open XML Formats

  24 Dec 2007

  Today's author: Danny Khen, a program manager who works on both the Excel and Excel Services teams. What is this about? Office 2007 introduced new default file formats – Open XML. Excel, Word and PowerPoint take advantage of them. One of the nicest things about those file formats is that they enable...
• Intraday Time Series Charts

  17 Dec 2007

  Today’s Author: Scott Ruble, a lead program manager on the Excel team who focuses on the area of data visualization. Scott is going to discuss how to create an intraday time series chart. Periodically, users need to create a chart where the data occurs within a single day such as by the minute or hour...
• Chart Pattern Fills

  16 Nov 2007

  Today’s Author: Eric Patterson, a program manager on the Excel team. Eric is going to discuss applying pattern fills to chart data points and includes a sample add-in for this purpose. Overview In Excel 2007, the interface for applying Pattern fills to chart elements has been removed in favor of the...