We all have been there. The boss calls an unexpected meeting and instructs you to prepare a sales report for the last quarter. Maybe you are the boss, heck, you own the company and you need to quickly prepare a report for an investment meeting. Of course, it’s one thing to enter data into a spreadsheet but it’s another to know how to manipulate the data so that you’re able to present it to your boss or colleagues. Whether it’s organizing or filtering data, excel has some great features to help you present your information in a professional and timely manner. Today, I will share with you one quick trick to using charts in excel that will have you performing like a pro in no time. Let’s get to it!

Charts

If you love using charts in excel like I do, you know they are the easiest way to present a large amont of data.  Charts are great when you’re trying to compare values across categories.  For the sake of time I will use a small sample data but rest assure the methods apply to any data size.

To compare values across categories, you want to:

1. Select the data you want to compare. In this example I want to query which region had the highest sales for the first quarter of 2012; therefore, I selected order date, region, and totals for January 2012 (figure 1).

(Figure 1)

2. Click on the insert menu to select your chart. For this particular question we want to choose a column chart for comparing. Under column chart, I picked the clustered column since order of categories isn’t important. (Figure 2).

Figure 2

3. Under chart layouts, click on layout 4. I picked this layout because it provides a more detail picture of the information (e.g. dates, region, and total sold) in the spread sheet.  Given the information we have charted below, you can clearly see that the central region had the most sales in the first quarter of 2012. (Figure 3)

Figure 3

As you can see, excel can be a good tool in presenting data. For the sake of time this tutorial is limited. Of course, you can do a lot more with charts. (e.g. comparing by percentage and organizing).

Please let me know if you found this tutorial helpful and if you would like to see more MS office tutorials. It’s my goal to provide you with the best information to help you with your business or career. I welcome constructive feedback.

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