How to Create a Chart in Excel

In this article, WikiHow will show you how to create visual data visualizations in Microsoft Excel using pie charts.

Table of Contents

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Open the Microsoft Excel program. This program has an icon that looks like a white “E” on a green background.

If you want to create a chart from existing data, double-click the Excel document containing the data to open it and proceed to the next step.

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Click on Blank workbook – Blank workbook (for PC) or Excel Workbook (for Mac). This button is located at the top left of the “Template” window.

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Add a name to the chart. To add a name to the chart, click in cell B1 , then enter the name of the chart.

For example, if you create a chart for your budget, cell B1 is titled something similar to “2017 Budget”.
You can also enter a label for clarity in cell A1 – for example, “Budget allocation”.

Create a chart

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Select all data. To select, click in cell A1 , hold down ⇧ Shift , and then click the bottom value in column B . So you can select all the data.

If your data is in columns marked with letters, numbers, etc. otherwise, click the top left cell in the data group and then click the bottom right cell while holding down ⇧ Shift .

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Click the Insert tab. This tab is at the top of the Excel window, just to the right of the Home tab.

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Click the “Pie Chart” icon. This icon is the round button in the “Charts” options group, just below and to the right of the Insert tab. You will then see several options appear in the drop-down menu:

2-D Pie – Create a simple pie chart showing color-coded sections of data.
3-D Pie – Uses a three-dimensional pie chart that displays color-coded data.

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Click an option. This helps to create a pie chart based on existing data; you’ll see color-coded tags at the bottom of the chart that correspond to the colored parts of the chart.

You can preview the options here by hovering over the different chart patterns.

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Customize the look and feel of the chart. To customize the look, click the Design tab near the top of the “Excel” window, then click an option in the “Chart Styles” group. This will change the look of your graph, including the colors used, how the text is distributed, and whether or not the percentage is visible.

To view the Design tab, you must select the chart by clicking on it.

Advice

You can copy the chart and paste it into other Microsoft Office products (such as Word or PowerPoint).
If you want to create charts for multiple groups of data, repeat this process for each group. Once the chart is displayed, click and drag the chart out of the center area of the Excel document to prevent the latter from overlapping the previous one.

Steps

More data

Create a chart

Advice

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