Excel Graphs

There are many kinds of graphs in Excel, and this page looks at a few of the most common types of graphs.

The first is just to do a scatterplot of all the data points. This allows us to “see” the variability of the data:

Scatterplots

Similar to this is to graph each point as a column. This gives us a bit more sense of how “big” each value is:

Column Charts

Similar to a column chart (one column per data point) is a histogram. Instead of plotting each point, the graph shows the number of points in various ranges (for example, 1-10, 11-20, etc.). There is a built-in tool for creating histograms in the Data Analysis tool pack:

Histograms using the Data Analysis Tool Pack

Histograms can also be constructed using the Excel function FREQUENCY():

Histograms using the FREQUENCY() function

And the last graph type we will look at is an XY scatterplot:

XYScatterplots