Choosing the right chart - 5 tips

Excel is the most used application to find, sort, filter, create and analyze data to make reports. To make a report, it is essential to use the appropriate functions, formulas, tables, and charts so that nothing goes wrong, which can lead to misleading conclusions.

Here are 5 tips for choosing the right chart for your data to get the best results.

Choosing the right chart - 5 tips

• Comparison Charts

The comparison or relationship charts are used when we have more than one variable to be depicted. For example, Age of 10 different people. The charts in excel that can be used are Bar charts, histograms, etc. These are mostly used to make comparisons. It is mandatory in such charts that you wisely choose the data to be depicted on X-axis and Y-axis.

• Relationships Charts

Relationship charts are drawn to find a relationship between 2 or 3 variables. It is often used to find how related the variables are; in statistical language, relationship graphs are used to find the correlation between two or more variables. For such purposes, we use scatter charts or scatter plots. The position of the points in the scatter plot depicts the relationship between the variables, it could be positive, negative or no relationship.

• Trend Charts

Trend charts are used to depict a pattern. Usually, ups and downs.It depicts trends like uptrends, downtrends, long-term trends, and so on. These are often used to track sales, revenues, profits, stock price movements and so on. Based on these trend analysis charts, companies often make forecasts. To depict the trends we use line charts in excel.

• Composition charts

A composition chart is used to depict what a whole is composed of. For example, what makes a full cake, say, 20% of flour, 10% of chocolates, and so on. The composition charts include pie charts, donut charts, and so on.

• Flow Charts

Flow charts are used to describe a set of activities to be performed in a specific manner. It is also used to categorize things. These are often called decision trees. The type of flow chart depends on the information that you need to fill in.

While making charts is easy, making the right chart is imperative. A wrong choice of the chart can lead to false conclusions. Thus, choosing the best fit chart is essential. Try using the 5 tips to select the best chart for your data and let us know in the comments section if this article helped you.