I'm not being big headed when I say I know my way around Excel fairly well - It was part of my daily job to use them and adjusting spreadsheets to show results / data was all OK to me. BUT, in all this time I've never had to display results in anything other than totals / sums / formulae on a spreadsheet, never using pie charts, with colour codes, etc.

Any chance of an easy guide to it, and what format the data needs to be in? i.e is it 50,20,5,25 - as long as the sum = 100.0. :confused: I need to show % cost of sales as well, compared to actual sales over a period which will be XX.X % figures. Assume I just need to show it on a 0 - 100 Y axis scale.

Excel can work out percentages even if the actual numbers don't add up to 100...though if you're actual figures are percentages then it would be a bit worrying if they didn't add up to 100...

Easiest way to do it is just to highlight the cells you want to chart, and click the button on the top bar which is a small graph (on mine - Excel 2003 - it is a bar graph with a blue, yellow and red bar) - this will take you to the Chart Wizard, in which can just click about at various things until you get what you're after...

Rob.

Cheers Rob

Just been playing with the Excel "insert chart" function, and as you say - It seems easy enough to work with. Just will have to wait to see how it works in practise with the core data I'm analysing.

As every 6 minutes of my time has to be accounted for on an electronic time keeping bit of equipment, I'm sticking down 18 minutes to this client for my own training time.

one more little tip - just select the data then press F11

Once you have your graph you can then manipulate it as you will, using the toolbars and chart menu....