Identifying chart elements

- [Instructor] We're looking at a worksheet that in many ways is atypical. Rarely will you see this many charts on the same sheet. And by the way, in Excel we use the word "chart". In common usage these are often called graphs, but in Excel we talk about charts. And if you go to the help system and look up "graph" you'll be directed toward charts. And on the screen we're seeing here a number of charts all based on the same data that's over in columns A through G, rows 4 through 8. And it reminds us that there are different ways to display data. And we're not saying that every one of these is ideal. In fact, we might make the case for saying a couple of them just don't work so well. The whole idea behind a chart is to display information visually. Give me the big picture, not necessarily interested in the detail. When you do work with charts in Excel, terms pop up all the time, and at first that could be intimidating. Notice on the yellow chart to the left, I've dragged the mouse over the upper portion. The outer area of any chart is called a chart area. Green chart to the right, slide over there, you see that same popup, chart area. We become familiar with this term. We're not trying to memorize these. The inner area of the chart, that's going to be the container for the lines or the columns or the pie sectors, is called the plot area. And you've probably heard the term legend. Most charts have a legend. For example, on the yellow chart to the left, we see various months here. The legend explains how the colors are being used. You're also likely to see the term series from time to time. That refers to, usually a row or a column of data. Also, if you click a chart, for example, I'm about to click on the white chart here, and we see if the data is nearby, the data that's the source of this chart, we see it being highlighted. Notice what happens when I click on the yellow chart. Same data is being highlighted. It's just being reflected or represented in a different way. The lines that we see in the chart, if you happen to click a line or point to it, it's a grid line. Become familiar with that term. Down the left hand side we've got what's called a vertical axis. Sure enough, on the bottom we've got a horizontal axis. We might have a chart title. Most charts do. We might have a vertical title down the left-hand side. That's called the vertical value axis title. Again, you don't want to memorize the terms, but as you start to use Excel charts and see them, and sometimes well before creating them, you're simply seeing charts created by someone else, you become familiar with the terms. And this does open the door to the idea that later, when you're trying to make changes, those terms are not so intimidating. Pie chart is a little bit different than the others. It's limited in what it can show, but it too has a series like the others, representing a row or a column of data. These various sectors here represent pieces of a pie. And by the way, don't ever try and use a pie chart with negative data. Excel somehow lets you do it. But think about it, there's no such thing as a negative piece of pie, is there? If you want to activate menu commands to make changes, and I'm not suggesting you do that early on in your use of charts, but if you happen to double-click, maybe you don't like the color of a line, double-click. What happens? That automatically activates a dialog box on the right-hand side of your screen. And there's that word series again. And so we could be formatting that line differently. There's a paint bucket that suggests color. We could click that, and tons of options as to what we might do with these various chart elements. And I'm not necessarily suggesting that every time you create a chart that you're going to make a lot of visual changes to it. Notice, too, that when you do click on a chart, I'll click outside of one first. Keep an eye on the menu system up above. I'm going to click on a chart. What happens? Two new tabs in the ribbon menu system. Chart Design. I'll click it. These are features related to the current chart. Format. And this is where you could get bogged down. Many, many choices here relating to format options on this chart. Click the chart to the right, the pie chart, we'll see those same tabs, but the choices here are quite a bit different because it's related to a different chart. So you start to become familiar with the layout of the menu system here. If I click on a worksheet cell, as I'm doing right now, those terms disappear. So we've got the context-sensitive menu system that really helps. And anytime, as I suggested earlier, you might right-click and change an element of a chart, you can also double-click, and that does the same thing. We refer to these various terms, by the way, as elements. And there are various techniques for getting into them. There's a plus that we'll talk about a bit later as well, too. So just becoming familiar with some of the terminology in charts is really helpful before you get into actually creating them.