Thread: Interactive charting

Only those who become very familiar with Excel's charting capabilities will be able to complete all four stages of the wizard and end up with exactly what they had in mind, so most users are likely to select their data, fire up the Chart Wizard, select a chart type and then click Finish, leaving all the fine-tuning to be done later.
Even getting the chart type wrong is no big deal. You can change it by right-clicking the chart and selecting Chart Type, which displays identical options to those in stage one of the wizard.



When an Excel chart is placed in a worksheet, you can make changes to it by right-clicking the chart and then choosing an option from the menu that appears. The menus change according to which part of the chart is clicked, so clicking on the plot area in the centre of the chart produces a different and more limited range of options than clicking on the chart background. And clicking on the legend at the side of the chart presents an even more focused menu with just two options - Format Legend and Clear.

To change an embedded chart into one that has its own worksheet, right-click either the plot area or the background and click Location, then select' As new sheet' and click OK. The decision can be reversed at any time. In general, use an embedded chart if the intention is to print it alongside its source data, but use a free-standing chart if you want to print it separately. And don't forget that free-standing charts don't have to remain in Excel- they can be copied and pasted into other programs and even saved in HTML format for use as web pages.