Spreadsheet.com supports more than a dozen different types of charts, giving you more ways to visualize your data beyond the spreadsheet grid.
Like Kanban views and Gantt charts, Spreadsheet.com’s charts give you more ways to visualize your data beyond the spreadsheet grid. Adding charts to a workbook can help you identify important statistics and trends on your data that may not be obvious when only looking at numbers and provide a more viewer-friendly way to understand your data when you share workbooks with a wider audience.
How to Create a New Chart
You can create a new chart in any Sheet view or in the sheet portion of a Gantt view. Click the New Chart button in the toolbar above your spreadsheet. Or, open the document menu and navigate to Insert > Chart.
How to Access the Document Menu
To access the document menu,
- Open the document dropdown by clicking the arrow to the right of the document name
- Select "Menu..." from the dropdown
Either option will open the Chart settings dialog on the right side of your window, from where you can specify the chart type and select data to include.
Selecting a Chart Type and the Chart Data
When you create a new chart, Spreadsheet.com will automatically open the Chart settings dialog on the right side of your window. The first part of the dialog you’ll see is the Setup panel.
First, select the type of chart you want to create by opening the menu under the Type header.
Once you’ve selected the type of chart, you can begin selecting the data for your chart. Your options for selecting data will change based on the type of chart you create.
Before you start specifying the range of data to include in your chart, specify whether or not the data series is Column based or Row based at the bottom of the dialog. Here, you can also specify whether or not the first row or column of your selected data should be treated as a header and excluded from the value or series selection.
Whether your chart should use Row based or Column based data depends on two things: (1) what you’re trying to visualize and (2) how your data is organized. Column based data allows you to select columns and ranges of values organized into columns as axis and series values for your chart. Row based data allows you to select rows as axis and series values for your chart.
Which data series type should I use?
Let’s take a look at two sample tables, both with the same data showing the number of units sold for three different products during one week. From this data, we want to create a chart organized by Product # with one series for each day of the week.
If our data was organized like the table on the left, where the Product # values are held in a row, we would select Row based data. We could specify our X-axis or Y-axis as the Product # row and select our subsequent series as each of the five rows underneath, one for each day of a week.
If our data was organized like the table on the right, where the Product # values are held in a column, we would select Column based data. We could specify our X-axis or Y-axis as the Product # column and select our subsequent series as each of the five subsequent columns, one for each day of a week.
Depending on the type of chart, you can select data for the Label, X-Axis, or Y-Axis and Value or Series.
Chart Category | Data Selection #1 | Data Selection #2 |
Pie | Label | Value |
Line | X-Axis | Series |
Column | X-Axis | Series |
Area | X-Axis | Series |
Bar | Y-Axis | Series |
Combo | X-Axis | Series |
For more information about selecting data for different types of charts, refer to their respective articles linked above.
Configuring Your Chart's Appearance
After selecting your chart data, navigate to the Configuration panel from the top of the Chart settings dialog. Here, you can change the visual appearance of your chart, including adding Chart & axis titles, changing the colors assigned to each series or value, and positioning the legend.
As you change your data selection and configuration options in the Chart settings dialog, your chart will automatically update to reflect the changes making it easy to check your work and adjust as necessary.
Read on to learn about managing your existing charts, or return to the introduction to get an overview of the more than a dozen chart types available in Spreadsheet.com.