Comparison
Charts
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The Need to Compare
Decision making is an important factor that forms part of
all everyday business situations, whether the decisions are
big or small they are still to be made. The bigger the risk
involved in making a decision the more analysis goes in to
preparing for an answer. With Excel's logical expressions
it is easy to represent data from over a period of time graphically
with comparison charts.
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| Creating Comparison Charts using
Excel When creating comparison charts with Excel to reflect
two sets of data over a period of for example the video sales
for the first six months of the year for 2005 and 2006, the
most common graphs that are used are line graphs, bar graphs
and column graphs.
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Setting up the data you wish to graphically represent is the first
step, for comparison charts you need to have two sets of data that
you wish to compare. If we remain with the concept of video sales
for the first six months of the year 2005 and 2006 your data would
look something like this.
The data can also be entered into the spreadsheet in columns instead
of rows. With the data as represented above you would be able to
create comparison charts. To Initiate the Chart Wizard which is
an Excel tool that assists in making comparison charts you highlight
the cells that contain the data you would like to represent. Select
Insert from th Excel toolbar and then charts.
A dialog box will appear, this is your Chart Wizard, this is the
Excel tool that will facilitate the manufacturing of comparison
charts. From the Chart type list select either the bar, column or
line graph depending on the information that you would like to graphically
represent. Remember when making a choice between bar and column
comparison charts, the values on the bar graphs are always easier
to interpret than those of the column graph. Click next to go to
the next step, here you have to remember to tell the Wizard whether
it should read the data in rows or columns, in the data example
above the data would have to be read in rows. If you do not make
the right selection your comparisons charts will be an incorrect
graphical representation of the data you have inputed.
The third step is an important step as this is the step where you
label the different parts of your comparison charts. These labels
include:
- Main title: Example video sales representation over the first
six months of the year 2005 and 2006.
- The X axis: in the above example this will be 'Months'
- The Y axis: the number of video sales
- You can also choose whether or not you can make use of a legend
which in the case of comparison charts would be necessary to differentiate
between the year 2005 and the year 2006.
- In the Legend tab you can also select where, in relation to
your graph you would like the legend to be positioned.
Also you can label the data labels, ie give the different colors
or lines depending on which of the comparison charts you chose,
and then label the months on the X-axis.
Miricle Solutions is a company that is established to train companies
to use the tools in Excel extensively to improve business solutions
in your work place. Miricle Solutions can help you to master the
art of comparison charts and other Excel tools.
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