Excel can seem incredibly daunting to first time users. It really isn't. Like most things in life, the most difficult part is working up the courage to do it in the first place.
I am by no means an Excel Guru, i'm not Microsoft Certified, and i don't claim to know everything about Excel. But i do know how to use it, and i can make it do pretty much anything i need to. So if i can help anyone else learn the basics then that would make me happy.
So the first thing you need when creating any spreadsheet is data.
Here we have Billy's expenses. We have 3 measures, or types of data.
The date of the record, the type of record, and the amount.
Data spreadsheets can be as simple as a 2 columns of data, to a maximum of 16,384 columns.
For this simple demonstration, we'll stick with three.
There are two common ways to create charts.
Select the data and place it straight into a chart, or by creating a pivot chart.
The first option is the simplest and easiest, so we'll start with that.
To create our first chart, Excel makes this pretty simple for us.
The first thing to do is select the data we want to appear in the chart.
As charts only require two types of data, or two measures, we need to select the two columns that contain the data we need displayed. In this case, the most relevant data is the date and the amount.
To select these two columns we click and drag from the top of the Date column, down to the last date in the column. Then, as the amount column is on the other side of the Expense column, and we don't need that column. Hold down Ctrl and click and drag from the top of the Amount column to the last field (Cell) containing an amount. This should be on the same row as the last date in the Date column.
The next thing we need to do is click on the "Insert" tab on the ribbon at the top left of the screen, here we see a selection of grouped buttons. We are looking for the "Charts" group, in this group we'll select "Line" an click on the little arrow underneath it. This pops up several options for line charts. Don't be afraid to play around with different types of charts.
For this example, we will click on the first option.
This will automatically insert a chart showing the amounts of expenses sorted by date.
And there we have it, a simple chart created from simple data in around 5 minutes.
If you have any requests for How To's or walkthroughs etc, leave them in the comments section and i'll see what i can do. I am mildly proficient in Excel, VBA, C Sharp, Visual Basic. Hell, give me 5 minutes and a laptop and i can be mildly proficient in whatever you need.
Until then, thank you for reading, and i hope it helps someone.
