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Aug 01 2013

A Comprehensive Guide To Excel Charts For Marketers [VIDEO]

As marketers, the most important skill you need in Microsoft Excel is the ability to create and manipulate charts (followed by how to work with pivot tables).

I reference charts frequently and wrote a post on how to make your charts sexy in Excel on the Search Engine Land site. And I did a presentation on giving your data an extreme makeover at SMX Advanced (which I’ll be doing again at SMX East if you missed it). But I realize I’ve done done a video walk through. So here you go.

Video Overview

To help marketers learn this critical skill I created a comprehensive video tutorial that goes through several charting techniques. Some of these include:

  • Creating column, bar, pie, line, area, and scatter charts (and what to use when)
  • Adding and removing data from charts the easy way (hint: if you’re using Select Data, you’re doing it the hard way)
  • Working with a secondary axis
  • Working with Excel’s built-in chart styles
  • Customizing colors to match your branding
  • Creating combination charts
  • Cleaning up Excel’s noisy default formats, like tick marks and gridlines (or at least less obtrusive)
  • Applying custom number formatting to chart axes
  • Going totally Spartan/minimalist with your charts
  • Using text boxes and shapes in charts

Download Excel Workbook

If you’d like to download the workbook I worked from to follow along, you can download it from Dropbox.

Video Tutorial

Few Notes

Because the adoption rate to Excel 2013 is pretty slow among marketers, I decided to do this tutorial using Excel 2010 for the PC and 2011 for the Mac. But if you’re using Excel 2013, you have all the same options; Excel just traded in pop-up menus for more of a Photoshoppy panel.

Also, I was originally going to show how to create stacked column and area charts, but the video got really long. And I use pivot charts to create them, which Mac users can’t use. I’ll do a separate tutorial sometime on how and when to use them.

One last thing: Sometimes I get this feedback sound in the recording. The only way I know to minimize it is to unplug my laptop while I’m recording. But even that didn’t totally take it away. I never had this problem on the Mac. Pfft.

Scrolling Charts

If you’re showing data over a long period of time and don’t want a crazy wide chart in your dashboard, check out this other video tutorial I did on creating scrolling charts in Excel.

Learn More

For more beastly data visualization tips, check out out my Annielytics Dashboard Course offerings.

Image Credit: Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Written by Annie Cushing · Categorized: Excel

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Cydne Stewart says

    February 15, 2014 at 1:03 am

    I would first like to say, you my friend are BRILLIANT. I love ‘Annielytics’ and even more so since I discovered your spot on tutorials for marketing! You totally Rock, Thanks and Cheers!

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      February 15, 2014 at 10:41 am

      Aww! This made my day! It’s so great to know I’ve helped another marketer in some small way! <3

      Reply
  2. Ingela says

    May 6, 2014 at 8:05 am

    Hi, unfortunately the dropbox link does not seam to be available anymore. Any chance you can renew it or send it through e-mail?

    Reply
    • Annie Cushing says

      May 6, 2014 at 9:59 am

      Yeah, Dropbox had a security breach and apparently disabled a bunch of links. It’s been updated now. Thanks for the head’s up.

      Reply

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