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A chart is a perfect tool to present data in an understandable way. But sometimes it sucks because we overload it with data. Yes, you heard it right.

I believe that when it comes to charts it should be neat and clean and the best solution to this problem is using interactive charts. By using interactive charts in Excel, you can present more data in a single chart, and you don’t even have to worry about all that clutter.

It’s a smart way. Look at the below chart where I am trying to show target vs. achievement, profit, and market share.

Do you think this is a decent way to present it?  Of course not. And now check out this, where have an interactive chart which I can control with option buttons.

What do you think?  Are you ready to create your first interactive chart in Excel?

Steps to Make an Interactive Chart in Excel

In today’s post, I’m going to show you the exact steps which you need to follow to create a simple interactive chart in Excel. Please download this file from here to follow along.

1. Prepare Data

1. First of all, copy this table and paste it below the original table.
   
2. Now, delete the data from the second table.
   
3. In the Jan month cell of target and achievement, insert the following formulas and copy those formulas into the entire row (Formula Bar).
   =IF($A$1=1,B3,NA())
   
4. After that, into the Jan month of profit and copy it into the entire row.
   
5. In the end, Jan month of market share copy it into the entire row.
   

Your interactive data table is ready.

All the cells in this table are linked with A1. And when you enter “1” in the A1 table will show you data for target and achievement only. For “2” it will show profit and market share for “3”.

2. Insert Option Buttons

1. Go to developer tab ➜ Control ➜ Insert ➜ Option button.
   
2. Insert three option buttons and name them as following.
   • Button-1 = TGT Vs. ACH
   • Button-2 = Profit
   • Button-3 = Market Share

   

3. After that, right-click on any of the buttons and select “format control”.
   
4. In format control options, link it to the cell A1 and click OK.
5. Now, you can control your data with these option buttons.
   

3. Insert Secondary Axis Chart

1. First of all, select your table and insert a column chart.
2. After that, select your data bars & click on “change chart type”. Go to Design Tab ➜ Design ➜ Change Chart Type.
   
3. Now for profit and market share, change the chart type to the line with markers and tick the secondary axis for both.
   

Congratulations! your interactive chart is ready to rock. You can also make some formatting changes to your chart if you want. 

Sample File

Download this sample file from here to learn more.

Conclusion

In the end, I just want to say that with an interactive chart you can help your user to focus on one thing at a time.

And you can save a lot of space in the dashboards as well. Sometimes you feel that it’s a lengthy process but it’s a one-time setup that can save you a lot of time. I hope this tip will help you to get better at charting, but now, tell me one thing.

What kind of interactive charts do you use? Share with me in the comment section, I’d love to hear from you, and please don’t forget to share this tip with your friends, I’m sure they will appreciate it.

More Charting Tutorials

• How to Add a Horizontal Line in a Chart in Excel
• How to Add a Vertical Line in a Chart in Excel
• How to Create a Bullet Chart in Excel
• How to Create a Dynamic Chart Range in Excel
• How to Create a Dynamic Chart Title in Excel
• How to Create a Sales Funnel Chart in Excel
• How to Create a HEAT MAP in Excel
• How to Create a HISTOGRAM in Excel
• How to Create a Pictograph in Excel
• How to Create a Milestone Chart in Excel
• How to Insert a People Graph in Excel
• How to Create PIVOT CHART in Excel
• How to Create a Population Pyramid Chart in Excel
• How to Create a SPEEDOMETER Chart [Gauge] in Excel
• How to Create a Step Chart in Excel
• How to Create a Thermometer Chart in Excel
• How to Create a Tornado Chart in Excel
• How to Create Waffle Chart in Excel

Power View is an Excel Visualization tool that allows you to build visually appealing graphs and charts, dashboards for management, and reports that can be issued daily, weekly, or monthly. When we think of Microsoft Excel, we think of various tools such as Formulae, which makes an analyst’s job simpler, PivotTables, which allows the user to analyze data distributed across a vast number of columns and rows, graph library, which is as comprehensive as any other programming language and so on. This article will provide an overview of Chart visualizations.

Chart Visualization

There are several Chart choices in Power View. Power View’s charts are interactive. Additionally, the Charts are interactive in a presentation context, allowing you to emphasize the analysis results dynamically. Charts can have numerous numeric variables and series. A chart’s design choices include displaying and removing – labels, legends, and titles. The following chart visualizations are available in Power View:

• Scatter Chart
• Bubble Chart
• Pie Chart
• Line Chart
• Bar Chart
• Column Chart

Example:

Step 1: First, enter data in the format shown below.

Step 2: Navigate to the Insert tab on the Excel ribbon and select the Power View option at the end of the list.

Step 3: When you select the Power View option, a power view report will be loaded and generated within the same worksheet. As illustrated in the picture below, you will have a power view report:

Step 4: Within Power View Fields, pick the Month, Quarter, and Sales Columns from the Range1 section. The ∑ sign is in the Quarter, Sales, and Percentage of Sales columns. It is present because those columns contain numeric data and may be summed.

Step 5: We will now include a graph. Navigate to the Design tab at the top of the ribbon to explore several design possibilities under the Power View Report sheet. Switch Visualization is one among them. This option allows you to include graphs in the Power View Report. Select the choice from the Other Chart.

Step 6: Select the Scatter option from the Other Chart dropdown menu.

Scatter Chart

A scatter chart always has two value axes: one set of numerical data running horizontally and another set of numerical data running vertically. Each dot in the scatter chart below represents a month, with the horizontal X axis representing the Quarter and the vertical Y axis representing Sales. Power view can distribute these data points evenly or unevenly across the horizontal axis.  It is determined by the data that the chart represents.

Bubble Chart

Follow the same steps to get the bubble chart of months and quarters. But in the bubble chart, you need to add the third numeric column that defines the size.

A bubble chart, a scatterplot extension, is commonly used to demonstrate correlations between three or more numerical variables. A single data point is represented by a bubble chart. The value of each bubble is indicated by its 1) horizontal position on the x-axis, 2) vertical position on the y-axis, and 3) size. In animation, the color of the bubble or its movement can occasionally represent additional dimensions. You may modify the Scatter Chart view to the Bubble Chart presentation by adding a third numeric column that defines the size of the data points.

Pie Chart

Follow the same steps to get the pie chart of months and quarters. In Power View, pie charts can be basic or complex. You may create a pie chart that drills down when you double-click a slice or one that displays sub-slices within the bigger color slices. A pie chart can be cross-filtered with another chart. Assume you choose a bar in a bar chart. The portion of the pie chart that corresponds to that bar is highlighted, while the remainder of the pie is greyed out. The Pie chart clearly shows that there are too many slices of months. Pie Charts operate best when the number of categories is 8 or less. By filtering the data, you may limit the number of categories.

Line Chart

Line charts are used to compare data points from many data series. Line charts align all category data along the horizontal (category) axis and all numerical value data along the vertical (value) axis. Months will be presented to the left or right, and the Line Chart will be displayed appropriately. Months are shown horizontally, while numerical value data is displayed vertically.

Bar Chart

Go to the Design tab and, this time, pick Clustered Bar from the Bar Chart dropdown choice inside the Switch Visualization menu. This option allows you to see all of your sales and months in a single chart.

Bar charts are used to compare data points from many data series. In a Bar Chart, categories are grouped vertically and values are organized horizontally. Consider utilizing a bar chart in any of the following situations: You have one or more data series that you would want to plot,  You want to compare data from several categories, and The axis labels are somewhat lengthy. There are three types of bar charts in Power View: stacked, 100% stacked, and clustered. Months are shown vertically, whereas numerical data is displayed horizontally.

Column Chart

A column chart may be used to depict data that is organized in columns or rows on a spreadsheet. Column charts are great for displaying data changes over time or presenting comparisons between things. Column charts include horizontal axes for categories and vertical axes for values. There are three column chart subtypes available in Power View: stacked, 100% stacked and clustered. The months are shown horizontally, while the numerical data is displayed vertically.

Power View’s charts are interactive. When you click on a value in one of the charts in Power View, that value is highlighted, and all of the tables, matrices, and tiles in Power View are filtered to that value.

After you input your data and select the cell range, you’re ready to choose the chart type. In this example, we’ll create a clustered column chart from the data we used in the previous section.

Step 1: Select Chart Type

Once your data is highlighted in the Workbook, click the Insert tab on the top banner. About halfway across the toolbar is a section with several chart options. Excel provides Recommended Charts based on popularity, but you can click any of the dropdown menus to select a different template.

Step 2: Create Your Chart

1. From the Insert tab, click the column chart icon and select Clustered Column.

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1. Excel will automatically create a clustered chart column from your selected data. The chart will appear in the center of your workbook.
2. To name your chart, double click the Chart Title text in the chart and type a title. We’ll call this chart “Product Profit 2013 — 2017.”

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We’ll use this chart for the rest of the walkthrough. You can download this same chart to follow along.

Download Sample Column Chart Template

There are two tabs on the toolbar that you will use to make adjustments to your chart: Chart Design and Format. Excel automatically applies design, layout, and format presets to charts and graphs, but you can add customization by exploring the tabs. Next, we’ll walk you through all the available adjustments in Chart Design.

Step 3: Add Chart Elements

Adding chart elements to your chart or graph will enhance it by clarifying data or providing additional context. You can select a chart element by clicking on the Add Chart Element dropdown menu in the top left-hand corner (beneath the Home tab).

To Display or Hide Axes:

1. Select Axes. Excel will automatically pull the column and row headers from your selected cell range to display both horizontal and vertical axes on your chart (Under Axes, there is a check mark next to Primary Horizontal and Primary Vertical.)

   

2. Uncheck these options to remove the display axis on your chart. In this example, clicking Primary Horizontal will remove the year labels on the horizontal axis of your chart.

   

3. Click More Axis Options… from the Axes dropdown menu to open a window with additional formatting and text options such as adding tick marks, labels, or numbers, or to change text color and size.

   

    

To Add Axis Titles:

1. Click Add Chart Element and click Axis Titles from the dropdown menu. Excel will not automatically add axis titles to your chart; therefore, both Primary Horizontal and Primary Vertical will be unchecked.

   

2. To create axis titles, click Primary Horizontal or Primary Vertical and a text box will appear on the chart. We clicked both in this example. Type your axis titles. In this example, the we added the titles “Year” (horizontal) and “Profit” (vertical).

   

To Remove or Move Chart Title:

• Click Add Chart Element and click Chart Title. You will see four options: None, Above Chart, Centered Overlay, and More Title Options.

  

• Click None to remove chart title.
• Click Above Chart to place the title above the chart. If you create a chart title, Excel will automatically place it above the chart.
• Click Centered Overlay to place the title within the gridlines of the chart. Be careful with this option: you don’t want the title to cover any of your data or clutter your graph (as in the example below).

To Add Data Labels:

1. Click Add Chart Element and click Data Labels. There are six options for data labels: None (default), Center, Inside End, Inside Base, Outside End, and More Data Label Title Options.

   

2. The four placement options will add specific labels to each data point measured in your chart. Click the option you want. This customization can be helpful if you have a small amount of precise data, or if you have a lot of extra space in your chart. For a clustered column chart, however, adding data labels will likely look too cluttered. For example, here is what selecting Center data labels looks like:

   

To Add a Data Table: 

1. Click Add Chart Element and click Data Table. There are three pre-formatted options along with an extended menu that can be found by clicking More Data Table Options:

   

Note: If you choose to include a data table, you’ll probably want to make your chart larger to accommodate the table. Simply click the corner of your chart and use drag-and-drop to resize your chart.

To Add Error Bars:

1. Click Add Chart Element and click Error Bars. In addition to More Error Bars Options, there are four options: None (default), Standard Error, 5% (Percentage), and Standard Deviation. Adding error bars provide a visual representation of the potential error in the shown data, based on different standard equations for isolating error.

   

2. For example, when we click Standard Error from the options we get a chart that looks like the image below.

   

 To Add Gridlines:

1. Click Add Chart Element and click Gridlines. In addition to More Grid Line Options, there are four options: Primary Major Horizontal, Primary Major Vertical, Primary Minor Horizontal, and Primary Minor Vertical. For a column chart, Excel will add Primary Major Horizontal gridlines by default.

   

2. You can select as many different gridlines as you want by clicking the options. For example, here is what our chart looks like when we click all four gridline options.

To Add a Legend:  

1. Click Add Chart Element and click Legend. In addition to More Legend Options, there are five options for legend placement: None, Right, Top, Left, and Bottom.

   

2. Legend placement will depend on the style and format of your chart. Check the option that looks best on your chart. Here is our chart when we click the Right legend placement.

   

To Add Lines: Lines are not available for clustered column charts. However, in other chart types where you only compare two variables, you can add lines (e.g. target, average, reference, etc.) to your chart by checking the appropriate option.

To Add a Trendline:

1. Click Add Chart Element and click Trendline. In addition to More Trendline Options, there are five options: None (default), Linear, Exponential, Linear Forecast, and Moving Average. Check the appropriate option for your data set. In this example, we will click Linear.

   

2. Because we are comparing five different products over time, Excel creates a trendline for each individual product. To create a linear trendline for Product A, click Product A and click the blue OK button.

   

3. The chart will now display a dotted trendline to represent the linear progression of Product A. Note that Excel has also added Linear (Product A) to the legend.

   

4. To display the trendline equation on your chart, double click the trendline. A Format Trendline window will open on the right side of your screen. Click the box next to Display equation on chart at the bottom of the window. The equation now appears on your chart.

   

Note: You can create separate trendlines for as many variables in your chart as you like. For example, here is our chart with trendlines for Product A and Product C. 

To Add Up/Down Bars: Up/Down Bars are not available for a column chart, but you can use them in a line chart to show increases and decreases among data points.

Step 4: Adjust Quick Layout

1. The second dropdown menu on the toolbar is Quick Layout, which allows you to quickly change the layout of elements in your chart (titles, legend, clusters etc.).

   

2. There are 11 quick layout options. Hover your cursor over the different options for an explanation and click the one you want to apply.

   

Step 5: Change Colors

The next dropdown menu in the toolbar is Change Colors. Click the icon and choose the color palette that fits your needs (these needs could be aesthetic, or to match your brand’s colors and style).

Step 6: Change Style

For cluster column charts, there are 14 chart styles available. Excel will default to Style 1, but you can select any of the other styles to change the chart appearance. Use the arrow on the right of the image bar to view other options.

Step 7: Switch Row/Column

1. Click the Switch Row/Column on the toolbar to flip the axes. Note: It is not always intuitive to flip axes for every chart, for example, if you have more than two variables.

   

In this example, switching the row and column swaps the product and year (profit remains on the y-axis). The chart is now clustered by product (not year), and the color-coded legend refers to the year (not product). To avoid confusion here, click on the legend and change the titles from Series to Years.

Step 8: Select Data

1. Click the Select Data icon on the toolbar to change the range of your data.
2. A window will open. Type the cell range you want and click the OK button. The chart will automatically update to reflect this new data range.

   

Step 9: Change Chart Type

1. Click the Change Chart Type dropdown menu.

   

2. Here you can change your chart type to any of the nine chart categories that Excel offers. Of course, make sure that your data is appropriate for the chart type you choose.

   

3. You can also save your chart as a template by clicking Save as Template…

4. A dialogue box will open where you can name your template. Excel will automatically create a folder for your templates for easy organization. Click the blue Save button.

   

Step 10: Move Chart

1. Click the Move Chart icon on the far right of the toolbar.
2. A dialogue box appears where you can choose where to place your chart. You can either create a new sheet with this chart (New sheet) or place this chart as an object in another sheet (Object in). Click the blue OK button.

   

Step 11: Change Formatting

1. The Format tab allows you to change formatting of all elements and text in the chart, including colors, size, shape, fill, and alignment, and the ability to insert shapes. Click the Format tab and use the shortcuts available to create a chart that reflects your organization’s brand (colors, images, etc.).

   

2. Click the dropdown menu on the top left side of the toolbar and click the chart element you are editing.

   

Step 12: Delete a Chart 

To delete a chart, simply click on it and click the Delete key on your keyboard.