Presenting Data with Excel D.A. Whatley (SMG ‘15) – SMG ITS Student Consultant

Agenda  Charting Concepts  Selecting Proper Charts  “Big Four” Charts  Common Chart Styles  Chart Tools (Editing Charts)  Design Tab  Layout Tab  Format Tab  Chart Building  General Rules  Creating A Quick Chart  How To Graph Specific Data  How To Graph Contiguous Data  How To Graph on a New Worksheet  Inserting Excel Charts into PowerPoint  As a Picture  As a Link

Charting Concepts

Selecting Proper Charts  Subjective to you, your professor’s or company’s conventions  Over 70 basic chart types available  We will focus on what is known as the “Big Four” of Charts

“Big Four” Charts  Column – great for accentuating volumes  Line – great for showing trends  Bar – same as Column, but rotated at 90 degrees  Pie – showing how categories make up for a total amount (e.g. a breakdown by regional sales)

Common Chart Styles  Clustered  Default, basic view  Not recommended for dealing with lots of data  Stacked  Good for displaying total sales as a whole and raw numbers  Hard to read with data across numerous periods  100% Stacked  Somewhat of an alternative to a pie chart as it shows numbers as a percentage of a whole  Focuses more on a number’s proportion of a whole rather than its raw value

Chart Tools (Editing Charts)

Design Tab  Change Chart Type  Allows us to go and choose another chart to convey our data  Switch Row/Column  To swap the data located on the x- and y-axis  Quick Layout  12 template styles to apply titles and other pertinent information to your chart  Quick Styles  A fast way to easily change the data lines/bars/etc. appear on your chart

Layout Tab  Insert – applying pictures, shapes, and text boxes  Great for pointing our a significant event on your chart  Labels  Allows for customization of labels within charts  Axes  Adjusting major and minor gridlines and the axes titles  Background  Customize the background of the chart with colors or pictures

Format Tab  More options to customize the colors, text, and other elements within the graph itself

Chart Building

General Rules  Before creating any graph, hold the left mouse button and highlight any data you want to be graph  Don’t graph averages, percentages, and totals with raw data.

Creating A Quick Chart  After highlight the data you wish to graph, hold ALT and press F1 to create a quick chart.  It will appear immediately on the current worksheet that has your data.  More often that not, however, the chart might not contain everything we need (e.g. chart titles, legends, etc.).  Use the Chart Tools tab to fix your chart.

Graphing Specific Data  Sometimes we might not want to include certain data in our graph.  To include a few elements you want, hold down the CTRL button and highlight the data you want to graph.

Graphing Contiguous Data  If working with a huge amount of data (e.g. sales for the late 10 years), select one cell within the data and hold down ALT and press F1 for a quick graph

How To Graph on a New Worksheet  To avoid having your graphs appear on the same worksheet, select the data you want graphed and then press F11.

Inserting Excel Charts into PowerPoint

As A Picture  Best for using a graph with static data – data that won’t be updated in the future  Select the chart you want to be incorporated in your PowerPoint.  Go to the Home tab of the Ribbon and go to the Clipboard section.  On the Copy dropdown menu, select Copy as Picture.  On the pop-up menu, don't change any of the options and select OK.  Open PowerPoint.  Under the Home tab of PowerPoint,  Go to the Clipboard section  Under the “Paste” dropdown menu, select Picture.  There you go! Adjust the graph as you would with any picture

As A Link  Best for using a graph with dynamic data (Data that will be changing in the future.)  Same steps as up to the Copy step.  Instead of Copy as Picture, click Copy.  Open PowerPoint.  Use Destination Theme & Link Data  Keep Source Formatting & Link Data  When you go the Paste dropdown menu this time, choose one of two options.  The former of the two options allows us to incorporate our graph into presentation's theme.  The latter allows us to keep the graph's current style as-is and place it into the presentation.

Upcoming TechShops  Advanced Excel - Monday, November 18 th  More sophisticated Excel techniques which demonstrate Vlookups and Macros  Bloomberg Terminal Training – Monday, November 18 th  How to use the Bloomberg Terminals for finance operations  Presenting Data with Excel – Monday, December 2 nd  Learn how to create easy-to-understand graphs to visually display information quickly and accurately

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