Chroming Excel: How to make pretty graphs
Microsoft Excel, by default, produces fairly ugly graphs and visualizations. Unfortunately, it’s used for lab reports, business presentations, classroom work, inventories, and everything else under the sun. “Blue on grey” is ubiquitous. There’s no reason why Excel graphs have to be so bad. With a little work, you can turn boring Figure 1.a into a masterpiece.
Here is some sample data that looks like lab-data for a titration, visualized on the x-and-y axes in the default scheme:
First, let’s change that awful background color from flat grey to a lightened white -> grey gradient:
Second, the lines are too thin, and too dull. Let’s improve the color and thickness of the line and bullets:
Third, the axes need some work. Add minor tick marks inside, and lighten the obnoxious gridlines. Excel graphs are for showing patterns, not reading off data, so those gridlines just get in the way of presentation:
Fourth, the title text is far too small–and boring. Fix it up with 14pt Century Gothic Bold, and increase the size of your axis labels from 6 to 10:
Finally, remove the border to suit:
Isn’t that a lot better looking than the Microsoft Excel default? By making your graphs and visualizations more appealing, you will be able to better communicate your message. You’ll have more interest from your audience, more eyes on your data, and no bored businessmen falling asleep.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 30th, 2004 at 4:47 am and is tagged with axis labels, default scheme, gridlines, visualizations, business presentations, classroom work, microsoft excel, titration, axes, gradient, businessmen, background color, inventories, graphs, bullets, masterpiece, tick, audience, microsoft, sun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on December 2nd, 2004 at 3:54 am
Useful advice. Coincidentally I’m actually doing multiple excel graphs as I write this, which is the reason I’m here… sheer boredom. Seriously though, nice advice.
on December 2nd, 2004 at 6:13 pm
Or, you could just use gnuplot…
on December 2nd, 2004 at 6:34 pm
I haven’t used gnuplot, even though I do use a few GPL / unix tools on my windows box. Still, the screenshots on their site don’t give me much hope for them… and do you expect millions of office drones to learn a gnu tool? Open source isn’t known for usability…jsut results.
on May 27th, 2006 at 12:12 pm
It is good to find other people who are dissatisfied with the default charts in Excel. They do tend to burn the eyes.
We put together an Excel chart cleaner add-in that automatically takes out chart-junk, fixes colors, eliminates 3d, etc. It’s free and can be found here: www.juiceanalytics.com/weblog/?p=161
on June 6th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
Do you know how to add comments inside an excell graph? If not what is a better tool to use for graphing? Leah Amir please respond via e-mail at leahamir@vantageview.com
on September 19th, 2006 at 1:52 am
such a shame that we can only create these BORING! charts in the 21st century!
((((
I’m searching for ideas on how to make better looking charts without upgrading to Excel 2007 or Chrystal Report but Excel 2003 just seems to be stucked into the 19th century…
my 2 years old son can draw better charts than this stupid tool….
on March 21st, 2007 at 6:56 am
I suggest the author reads Edward Tufte’s stellar “the visual display of quantitive information”. Title sounds boring, but look at the reviews on Amazon. Read it then revisit the graphs above!
on May 30th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
It’s agreed that the default Excel spreadsheet is pretty ugly, but Mark is right about what direction to take the data in.
To paraphrase a principle from Tufte’s book: More content / less flash and sizzle, i.e., let the data do the talking. Or to use another metaphor: improve the signal to noise ratio.
on April 30th, 2008 at 12:33 am
Ick!
The default gray background in excel is ugly and the gradient background is even worse. It looks like a cheesy powerpoint presentation from the 1990’s. Just take away the background, turn the diamonds into solid little dots and you’ll have a professional looking graph. Incidentally, it should be NaOH, with a capital H.
on May 4th, 2008 at 9:08 am
Matthew, I agree, but how do you take away the horrible gray background? Excel doesn’t seem to have any way of changing it.
on June 23rd, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Tom, Right click and select FormatPlotArea