There are several Excel 2013 Column Charts to choose from, and in Excel Video 459 we’ll walk through the differences and make a recommendation or two. The first column chart recommendation from my perspective is to stick with two dimensional charts. Save the 3D for movies. Occasionally 3D charts can make things look fancy, but too often the style takes away from the message you need to convey. I generally use the standard clustered column chart. If you need to display relationships between the parts, stacked column charts can be better than pie charts. You can display multiple stacked columns in a chart, which is more efficient than having all of the space that pie charts take up, and pie charts are hard to judge relative sizes because of the geometry of circles. I still prefer the clustered column charts since they are much easier to read than stacked columns.
The other take away from column charts is the first step is to get your data to tell the story you need to tell, and then use a chart to display the results. Column charts or any Excel chart can only do so much to tell a story. Notice how much more helpful my second chart is compared to the original chart.
Stay tuned. We’ll talk Excel 2013 Bar Charts in the next Excel Video. Thanks for watching.