Mr. Excel offers suggestions for maximizing charts in your spreadsheet program.

For the uninitiated, creating charts in Excel can be a confusing mass of buttons and commands. Here are five tricks for becoming a chart-making champ. Click on the links to see screen shots of each step.

  1. Create a graph with one click
    1. Select your data.
    2. Press F11.
    3. Presto! You have a graph.


  2. Right-click to customize
    You can customize the following chart elements with a simple right-click.
    • To format the Y-axis using a K for thousands of dollars, right-click the chart and type: $#,##0,K
    • Format plot areas with color gradients.
    • Change color of bars.
    • Add data labels to bars.
    • Replace single marker with picture.
    • Here's your chart.


  3. Drag and drop new data to chart
    Adding new months of data commonly causes problems. Here's how to do it without the mess.
    1. Type new month's date in worksheet.
    2. Highlight data.
    3. Grab border and grab toward chart.
    4. Drop new data on chart and chart will instantly update.


  4. Totals and averages without formulas
    The status bar in the bottom-right corner of Excel offers a glimpse of the sum of a range of numbers.
    1. Highlight any range and the second block on the status bar's right side will show the sum of the range.
    2. Right-click this box to change the sum to average, minimum, maximum, and so on.


  5. Automatically add subtotals to list
    1. Start with a list of data sorted by a particular field.
    2. From the menu, select Data > Subtotals.
    3. In the Subtotals dialog box, check the fields you want to subtotal.
    4. Click OK.
    5. Excel changes the subtotals as you scroll through various customer fields.
    6. Click the 2 button in the top-left corner and you'll see the totals by customer.
    7. Click the 3 button on Group & Outline to see all the data again.


Here are two more Excel tips I didn't have time to explain on today's show. They're in PDF format.



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