They should enhance your chart, not detract from it. Place Elements Intelligently: Pay attention to where you place titles, legends, symbols, and any other graphical elements. Be concise but use descriptive language, and be intentional about the orientation of any text (for example, it’s irritating to turn your head to read text written sideways on the x-axis). Use Text Wisely: While charts and graphs are primarily visual tools, you will likely include some text (such as titles or axis labels). While it can be fun to experiment with different styles, choose the theme that best fits your purpose.
Remove any unnecessary information so your audience can focus on the point you’re trying to get across.Ĭhoose Appropriate Themes: Consider your audience, the topic, and the main point of your chart when selecting a theme. Make It Clean: Cluttered graphs - those with excessive colors or texts - can be difficult to read and aren’t eye catching. Below are the top five best practices to make your charts and graphs as useful as possible: No-code required.Īlthough Excel provides several layout and formatting presets to enhance the readability of your charts, you can maximize their effectiveness with other methods. WorkApps Package your entire business program or project into a WorkApp in minutes.Digital asset management Manage and distribute assets, and see how they perform.Resource management Find the best project team and forecast resourcing needs.Intelligent workflows Automate business processes across systems.Governance & administration Configure and manage global controls and settings.Streamlined business apps Build easy-to-navigate business apps in minutes.Integrations Work smarter and more efficiently by sharing information across platforms.Secure request management Streamline requests, process ticketing, and more.Process management at scale Deliver consistent projects and processes at scale.Content management Organize, manage, and review content production.Workflow automation Quickly automate repetitive tasks and processes.Team collaboration Connect everyone on one collaborative platform.Smartsheet platform Learn how the Smartsheet platform for dynamic work offers a robust set of capabilities to empower everyone to manage projects, automate workflows, and rapidly build solutions at scale.I can then apply a custom date format to show only the year in the horizontal axis. Then enter Januas the minimum and as the maximum. To show only years, and make sure the line is displayed correctly across the range, I can set units to 1 year. If I plot the data as a line chart, Excel correctly interprets the dates and builds an automatic horizontal axis to fit the date range, with the unusual setting of 8 months for units. This is monthly stock price data over a period of more than 15 years, from July 2001 through May 2017, in more than 100 rows. Notice that even though the axis type is now text, Excel still understands the dates.įor example, I can apply a different date format, and the chart immediately updates. Now the data points are evenly spaced, and line up with the dates shown on the horizontal axis. In that case, you can switch the type to text. However, there may be times where you want a simple, even distribution. The axis shows an accurate distribution of the data. Now it's clear that the stock price data is plotted across the date range, and the data points don't necessarily line up with the dates in the axis. It'll be easier to see what's happening if I add data labels and drop lines to the chart. This is a little strange and maybe even confusing. Notice since we have a large date range, the interval is set to 1 year, and all dates are January 1. You can see category in the name, and if I open the format task pane to axis options, you can see Excel is using the Automatic setting, which, since we have valid dates, means we have options for minimum and maximum dates, as well as date intervals. If plot this stock price data as a line chart, the horizontal axis is automatically set up as a category axis with a type of "date". When you create a chart using valid dates on a horizontal axis, Excel automatically sets the axis type to date.įor example, this stock price data is spaced out over a period of more than 10 years, in random intervals. In this video, we'll look at an example of how Excel plots dates on a horizontal axis.
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