Charts visually display quantitative data.
They give us a quick impression of the size of the data and whether there are any patterns associated
with data.
You can also compare two data sets much faster if you use a column chart than if you have to go through
the numbers and compare. The most common chart types used in company reports are column or stacked column,
line, bar, and pie chart.
Now this is just a list of the most common ones.
If you take a look at the chart types you have available in Excel.
There are a lot more options.
Each chart type serves a purpose. Column charts for example are great for comparison or for ranking of
categories in order.
They're also easy to understand by different audiences because we're all used seeing column charts in
the media.
The bar chart is similar and it's more suited if you have long category labels or a lot of bars. So it
looks neater to organize a data in a bar chart than a column chart.
The line chart is well suited for showing trends. For example, how sales values change over time.
The pie chart is also common in company reports.
It's used for visualizing parts to whole relationships.
For example, the sales numbers broken down by division.
But it's not well liked by data visualization experts.
The reason is if you have a lot of pieces of the pie, it's difficult to compare the size of the pieces
with one another.
Now in addition to these chart types which are optimal for most audiences, we have more specialized charts.
For example the Pareto chart which brings attention to the categories that have the most impact.
There's also the histogram which shows the distribution of the data.
We have the tree map and Sunburst charts which are suited for displaying hierarchical data.
We're going to be covering all these in this section.
The great thing about Excel charts in general is that they're flexible. You can combine different
series types in one chart to create your own customized combination chart or combo chart, which is another
topic that we're going to cover in this section.
There's so much more to charts and data visualization than we get to cover in this course.
I get you started here so you can start exploring.