You've got a presentation due in a few days and you really want to impress the boss. You want to show your data in a way that's easy to understand, but also visual and impressive. The best way to do that is to choose the right Excel charts and graphs.

You can draw upon many different tools for creating charts and graphs, but Microsoft Excel remains one of the most powerful and functional of them all. It allows you to visualize data in whatever format and style you want, as you'll see below.

In this article, you'll learn about the many types of charts available to you in Microsoft Excel using examples from publicly available data provided by data.gov. The data set is drawn from the 2010 US Census; we'll use this data to show you how impressive it is when you pick the right Excel chart types for your data.

Creating the Right Excel Chart Types

The US Government provides volumes of data to the public annually, completely free to peruse. One of the most valuable bodies of information to learn more about cultural and social facts is the Census.

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For the first few examples below, I've referred to problems that renters have had with their dwellings, split up by the four regions of the United States.

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This is a nice, small subset of data, perfect for learning about Excel charts and graphs.

In order to decide which chart to use, you'll need to take a close look at what the data represents and how you want to visualize that data.

1. Excel Column Charts

One of the most common charts used in presentations, column charts are used to compare values to one another. Usually, these are values that have been categorized in some way. The most common subset of column charts is one set of data broken up into categories.

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In this case, I've chosen to break it down by the number of problems renters have in the Northeast United States. Once you've selected your data, just click Insert, and you'll see a choice of chart types in the menu. In this case, you can go with a 2-D or 3-D column.

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Personally, I prefer the look of 3-D charts. Here's what the data above looks like using 3-D bar charts.

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Unfortunately, bar graphs are created by default without any vertical or horizontal labels. You'll need to add those in so people know what each axis represents.

Doing that is easy enough. Just click the "+" button to the upper right corner of the chart, make sure Axis Titles is selected, and then only select Primary Vertical.

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Now, you'll see a vertical label that you can edit.

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As you can see, using a column chart to visualize categorized data makes the inequity being illustrated clear as day to see. Obviously, people in the Northeast have major plumbing and heating problems. How bad is the problem compared to the rest of the country?

To investigate this difference, let's add more categorized data using bar charts instead. Bar charts are the same as column charts, but the categories appear horizontally rather than vertically.

This time, highlight all the data.

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Now, click Insert in the menu above, just like you did before. This time, click on the dropdown for bar charts, just to the right of the column charts dropdown.

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There you have it. You now have a bar chart comparison of reported problems by renters, broken down by geographic region.

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I had to edit the title as shown. You do this simply by clicking on the title itself and typing a new title, at least in Microsoft 365. In other versions, you may need to click Advanced Edit.

As you can see, column charts and bar charts are a really cool way to either compare categorized data for one data set, or to compare categorized data across multiple data sets. For example, the regional chart above shows quite clearly that plumbing issues are much worse in the South and the Northeast, while the South struggles a lot more than anyone else with property upkeep.

2. Excel Pie Charts

As the name implies, pie charts are shaped like a pie. They're best used when you need to show how much of one dominant, overarching category is taken up by smaller sub-categories.

For example, a university may use a pie chart to show a breakdown of the racial demographics of its student population. Using our data above, you might use a pie chart to break Northeast renter problems down by repair issues.

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Pie graphs are some of the best Excel chart types to use when you're starting out with categorized data. With that being said, however, pie charts are best used for one single data set that's broken down into categories. If you want to compare multiple data sets, it's best to stick with bar or column charts.

3. Excel Line Charts

Moving on to line charts requires a new set of data. This is because line charts and other similar chart types tend to be time-dependent. You're usually charting a data point as it changes over a given period of time, although not always.

For a line chart, you only need an X and a Y value. In the example below, X will be time and Y will be population. You could just as easily chart other time-dependent variables, such as the productivity of your company (Y) as the number of bonuses paid goes up (X).

The census data set that we'll use in this example represents the change in population of the United States from 2010 through 2015.

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Highlighting the year and the total population columns and then clicking Insert from the menu above allows you to choose a line chart graph. Selecting this option results in a line chart in your spreadsheet. Right-click on the chart and choose Select Data Source. Make sure that the Year is unselected.

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Now that it's not trying to use the Year column as Y, it'll use it as X and correctly label your horizontal axis.

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At just a glance, you can see that the population of the US has been steadily increasing at a rate of about 0.76% per year. Very interesting, and line charts are some of the best Excel graphs and charts to use when conveying a progression like this.

4. Excel Area Charts

Area charts are identical to line charts, but the area under the line is filled in. While the focus of the line chart is still changing in value over time, the purpose of an area chart is to highlight the magnitude of these changing values over time.

The difference is subtle, but when you need to express things like how many trees have been clear cut from 1990 to 1995 versus 2000 to 2005, the area chart really is one of the best Excel chart types to use.

With the population data above, you can compare things like male versus female population growth from 2010 through 2015.

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You could also represent the same data using a stacked area chart (also available in the charts section under the Insert menu).

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This chart can be thought of as a line graph and a pie chart combined into one. You can see the percentage breakdown of the categorized data as that data changes over time.

5. Excel Scatter (XY) Charts

A favorite in the scientific community, scatter charts are plotted data points, usually highlighting a clustered anomaly amongst similarly-measured data points or a far-reaching outlier. They're used to show correlations or patterns in the data that aren't obvious when you're just looking at each individual datum.

For example, plotting cancer recovery success rates against time spent in the hospital may show a correlation between how long someone is treated for cancer and how successful the treatment is likely to be.

To show the power of this chart type, I've plotted the number of asthma hospitalizations in Chicago from 2000 through 2011, organized by zip code.

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This XY scatter chart reveals that zip code 60628 had more asthma hospitalizations per year than just about every other region, and zip codes 60655 and over make up the best areas to live if you want the least possible odds of having an asthma hospitalization.

6. Excel Bubble Charts

Bubble charts are also extremely useful for data sets like this. This is a fun visualization to create when you have three dimensions of data that you need to plot.

This is a typical XY plotted data point of two values (the point being a "bubble"), with a combined additional value that determines the size of that bubble. For example, with this kind of chart, you could plot how many teens go to the movies, but the size of each data point (bubble) may represent how many females make up that data set.

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It's a really interesting way to represent two sets of data with one chart. In the example above, if you included the name of the movies as the X-axis labels, you could identify which, of all of the movies listed, attracted a larger teen female audience.

7. Excel Surface Charts

These three-dimensional Excel chart types let you plot two sets of data points across several dimensions. It can be complex to use, but, with the right data points (IE, two sets of data with a clear relationship), the visualization can be quite impressive.

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The 3-D version of the chart looks like a topographic map, plotting altitude and distance from any given point. Similarly, you can use this map to do things like chart the severity of a disease outbreak against age and the time that the person remains sick.

By plotting in this way, interesting patterns might become self-evident, things that you'd never notice otherwise. Knowledge is power.

8. Excel Doughnut Charts

Doughnut charts are another complex visualization that lets you graph one data series in a sort of pie chart format. You can add additional data sets in "layers", resulting in a multicolored "doughnut". These Excel chart types are best used when the two data sets are subcategories of a larger category of data.

A good example of this are the data sets used earlier in this article, plotting male and female population per year.

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As you can see, every series (the years 2010 through 2015) contains nearly identical-sized segments, showing just how slowly both populations change from year to year. The value of this graph really comes from having the right data and the right goal that you want to achieve visually with that data.

Choosing the Right Excel Charts and Graphs

There may be a wide selection of graphs to use, but what you should actually choose really boils down to the type of data sets you're working with and just what exactly it is that you're trying to show or prove with that data. Some Excel charts and graphs will make your argument much clearer than others.

Knowing what the chart needs to accomplish is half of the battle. The other half is figuring out exactly how to arrange your data and format the chart.

The truth is that graphs make a huge impact on any presentation. Now that you know how to use everything that's available to you in Microsoft Excel, choosing the right Excel graphs and charts for your needs will be easy. You'll be able to create a presentation with them that'll really knock their socks off.