What Is a Chart?
A chart is a visual representation of numeric values. Charts (also known as graphs) have been an integral part of spreadsheets since the early days of Lotus 1-2-3. Charts generated by early spreadsheet products were quite crude but have improved significantly over the years. Excel provides you with the tools to create a wide variety of highly customizable charts.
New Feature
Excel 2007 charting is a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that Excel 2007 charts have a great new look. The bad news is that Microsoft did not provide any new chart types or any significant new features.
Displaying data in a well-conceived chart can make your numbers more understandable. Because a chart presents a picture, charts are particularly useful for summarizing a series of numbers and their interrelationships. Making a chart can often help you spot trends and patterns that may otherwise go unnoticed.
Figure 18-1 shows a worksheet that contains a simple column chart that depicts a company’s sales volume by month. Viewing the chart makes it very apparent that sales were down in the summer months (June through August), but they increased steadily during the final four months of the year. You could, of course, arrive at this same conclusion simply by studying the numbers. But viewing the chart makes the point much more quickly.
A column chart is just one of many different types of charts that you can create with Excel.