Creating a standard bar chart manually. To create a standard bar chart manually, select Chart on the Insert menu to launch the Excel Chart Wizard. The Chart Wizard first lets you choose the kind of chart you want to create. Because you want to create a column chart for this example, select Column as the Chart type and Clustered Columns as the chart subtype. Clustered columns compare values across categories (more about categories shortly). Click Next to proceed to the next screen, and select the Data Range and Series. The Data Range is the range of cells containing data that will be transformed into a chart. The range for this example is
='Bar Chart'!$A$1:$D$4
which translates to cells A1 through D4 in the Bar Chart worksheet. The wizard is pretty good at auto-selecting the data, but if you want to manually select the range, simply select the entire data range by using your mouse. (Click the first cell of the range you want to select and hold the left mouse button down as you drag to the last cell of the range you want.) For the Series selection, you can choose either rows or columns. In this example, selecting columns for the chart means that the months (January, February, and March) will be the series, which in turn makes the salespeople (John, Mae, and Al) the categories. Selecting rows as the series would do just the opposite: John, Mae, and Al would become the series, and January, February, and March would become the categories. . . .
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