Creating charts

Excel Sekho - With Excel 2013, you can create charts quickly by using the
Quick Analysis Lens, which displays recommended charts to summarize your data. To display recommended charts, select
the entire data range you want to chart, click the Quick Analysis button, and then click
Charts to display the types of charts that Excel recommends.

You can display a live preview of each recommended chart by pointing to the icon that

represents that chart. Clicking the icon adds the chart to your worksheet. 

If the chart you want to create doesn’t appear in the Recommended Charts gallery, select

the data that you want to summarize visually and then, on the Insert tab, in the Charts

group, click the type of chart that you want to create to have Excel display the available

chart sub types. When you point to a sub type, Excel displays a live preview of what the

chart will look like if you click that sub type.

When you click a chart sub type, Excel creates the chart by using the default layout and

color scheme defined in your workbook’s theme.

                                      KEYBOARD SHORTCUT

Press Alt+F11 to create a chart of the default type on the current

worksheet or press F11 to create a new chart sheet. Unless you or another user changed

the default, Excel creates a column chart. 

If Excel doesn’t plot your data the way that you want it to appear, you can change the axis

on which Excel plots a data column. The most common reason for incorrect data plotting

is that the column to be plotted on the horizontal axis contains numerical data instead of

textual data. For example, if your data includes a Year column and a Maintenance column,

instead of plotting maintenance data for each consecutive year along the horizontal axis,

Excel plots both of those columns in the body of the chart and creates a sequential series

to provide values for the horizontal axis.