It's
really tempting to let terrible Excel graphs creep into your marketing.
Your boss doesn't care about little things like how graphs look, right?
And whatever Excel comes up with as the default is probably fine ...
right?
Not really. You're using data to spur action. Maybe you pull data to convince your boss to adopt inbound marketing, give you an extra sliver of budget, or adjust your team's strategy, among other things. Regardless of what you use data for, you need it to be convincing -- and if you display data poorly, the meaning of your data is more likely to get lost.
To make sure you're making your data as convincing as possible, you should always customize your graphs in Excel. And by customization, we're not talking about big sweeping changes. Below are some quick tweaks you can make to your graphs convincing, easy-to-read, and beautiful.
Note: I'm using Excel from 2011 on a Mac. If you're using another version or operating system, implementing the following tips may look different.
1) Pick the right graph.
Before you start tweaking design elements, you need to know that your data is displayed in the optimal format. Bar, pie, and line charts all tell different stories about your data -- you need to choose the best one to tell the story you want.Bar graphs and pie graphs help you compare categories. Pie graphs usually compare parts of a whole and bar graphs can compare pretty much anything ... which means often you should just use a bar graph. Bar graphs are easier to read and notice incremental differences between categories, so it's a good go-to. Pie graphs are best used when one of the categories is way larger than the other.
Want to see the difference? Here's an example of the same data set displayed as a pie graph and a bar graph:
Written by Ginny Soskey
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