Introduction

Excel has built-in support for preparing a wide variety of charts , including custom charts, in your spreadsheet. You can even copy charts you create and embed them in Word documents. Charting is a handy data visualization technique that may provide valuable insight into the experimental or calculated data you may be trying to analyze. Excel makes charting quick and easy, and provides a great deal of flexibility in customizing your charts. Excel's charting capabilities are not as sophisticated as those of some specialized scientific data visualization applications, but in many cases Excel may be the fastest way to visualize data. This is especially true if you're generating your data in Excel via calculations or if you have already imported your data into Excel using techniques discussed in Chapter 3.