Key Skills > Charts

Index to Excel Chart Articles

Links to some of the popular Excel chart tutorials on the Contextures site and blogs. Build a box plot chart, pie chart, Gantt chart, a line chart, or a fancy clustered stacked chart!

Author: Debra Dalgleish

How to Build an Excel Box Plot Chart

With a Box Plot (box and whisker chart), you can see the distribution of numbers in data. Excel 2013, and earlier versions, don't have a Box Plot chart type, but you can create your own version, by adding calculations to the worksheet, and using a Stacked Column chart type, with error bars.

Go to the Box Plot tutorial, for step-by-step videos and written steps. and a sample file to download.

Excel Line Column Chart 2 Axes

If you use two different chart types in a single chart, it's called a combination chart, like the line-column chart shown below. This example is on 2 axes, and shows the sales dollars, in columns, and number of cases sold, in a line, for each product.

Go to the Line Column Chart tutorial, for step-by-step videos and written steps. and a sample file to download.

How to Make an Excel Pie Chart

A pie chart is a circle, with one or more slices, and each slice is sized to show its share of the overall total amount. See how to build a simple pie chart, and you can even add pictures to the pie chart slices, for a bit of fun, like the red or white pizza survey, shown below.

Go to the Pie Chart tutorial, for step-by-step videos and written steps. and a sample file to download.

Create Excel Cluster Stack Chart

A cluster stack chart has clusters of columns or bars, with a stack in each column or bar. See how to set up your Excel data to create a cluster stack column chart or a cluster stack bar chart. Or use a pivot table and pivot chart, for a quick and easy solution.

Go to the Cluster Stack Chart tutorial, for step-by-step videos and written steps. and a sample file to download.

Gantt Chart Project Plan

Although Excel doesn't have a built in Gantt chart type, you create a simple project plan in Excel, with a Gantt chart timeline. There are sophisticated project management tools, like Microsoft Project, but for small projects, where you don't need to manage a complex set of tasks and resources, Excel can probably do what you need.

Go to the Gantt Chart tutorial, for step-by-step videos and written steps. and a sample file to download.

Video: Line Chart With Target Range

In this video, see how to build an Excel line chart to show sales over six months, and show the target sales range in the chart's background. In the data, add the high and low values for the target range, and show that range in the background of the line chart.

For written steps, go to the Create an Excel Line Chart with Target Range page