Hi everyone, my name is Kevin. Today I want to show you how you can set up a line graph in
Microsoft Excel. It's a lot easier than you think, and as full disclosure before we jump into this,
I work at Microsoft as a full-time employee. All right, well, let's jump into it. I'm going to jump
on to my PC here and I have Excel 365. This comes with Office 365. It's the latest and greatest
version. If you don't have Excel, you could also go to office.com, sign in. It's entirely
for free and you could use Excel there. So I'm going to open up Excel that I have on my desktop
and what you'll see here is I have a table of data with here in the one column I have the years and
in the other column I have conference attendees for those different years. And looking at a table
only tells me so much what I would like to do is instead I'd like to see this data in the form of a
chart. So how do I insert a chart? So, what we do is we go to insert on the top bar here I'm going
to go ahead and click on insert and by far the easiest way to insert a line chart is to simply
click on recommended charts and what you'll see is the first one that's recommended to me
is a line chart. I also have a bar chart and I have different types of charts that I can insert
but I wanted to insert a line chart. So, let me go ahead. I'll click OK on that
and here what you'll see is I have my line chart, I have the number of attendees on the y-axis or
the vertical axis, and then here I have the years on the horizontal axis or the x-axis.
So, another way that we could also do this I'm going to go ahead and get rid of this for now.
I could go back to insert and here you'll see that I also have an option to insert a line or
area chart. So, I have all these different options here, but I'm going to go ahead and click on this
line one. When I insert this, unfortunately it's not quite as easy as the recommended chart.
But let me show you how I can get this chart to work with my data that I have here. So, what I'm
going to do is I'm going to click on this option that says select data on the top bar. And what
you'll notice here is these are my different line charts. Well, I don't want to chart out the year
because that's simply going to advance throughout the year, so I'm going to get rid of that.
And so I want to I want to map out the conference attendance over time. So I'm going to leave that
here as a legend legend entries or series. Now what you'll see is here it says the horizontal
axis. So this is the horizontal one right now it just goes from one to six,
but I want that to be the year. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on edit
and what I want the range to be is instead I want that to be the year here. So, I'm going to go
ahead and highlight the year and then you'll notice that it appears immediately down here
in my chart. So, I'm going to go ahead and click on OK, and this all looks good. So, I'm going to
click on OK. And so here you see the attendance by year. Now what I could also do is if I click on
add chart element, I could add labels for these, so let me add the primary horizontal label first.
So, I'm going to click here and what I could do is here I could just say this is the year
and I could also add another axis title, so I'll go back to the add chart element to access titles
and I'll add a vertical title in here, and maybe I'll just call this attendees.
And I could also get rid of this element down here since it's pretty clear since there's just
one thing that I'm charting out. So, here this is another way to create the same view or to
create a simple line chart. Now what I also wanted to show is how you can create a line
chart if you have multiple pieces of information and you want two different axes of information.
So here once again, I have a set of data. It's the same data as above where I have my
year, then I have my conference attendance, but now I also have food sales for those
different years. So how do I visualize that? Well, what I'll do is I'll go back to insert
and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to click on recommended charts and here you see a bunch of
recommendations. None of them are exactly what I want. So, actually I'm going to go ahead and click
on all charts. Now you see the full set of options I have. Because I have two different axes, this is
what's referred to as a combo chart. So, I'm going to click on combo and here you'll see that there
are two sets of information. I have my attendees and my food sales. So, what I could do is for the
conference attendance maybe what I want to do is I could go with the column that looks good. And
then the line for the food sales looks good. But what I want to do is rather than having them both
go off the same axes instead I want to say this is my secondary axes. And so now what you'll see is
the conference attendance is on my, my primary axes right here, and then my secondary axis,
axes is the food sales. So I'm going to go ahead and click on OK, and now you'll see that it shows
two sets of information using this left hand side and the right hand side to display this
combo information. So, just another way to create a chart and then maybe what I'd want
to do is I could retitle this and it could be conference attendance and food sales. So, there
I'm able to chart out two sets of information. So, that was just a really quick tutorial on how
you could create a really simple line chart in Microsoft Excel, whether you're just showing one
set of information or whether you're using two sets of axes the primary and the secondary. But
that's really as simple as it is. Hopefully, you found this tutorial helpful. If you did,
please give a thumbs up. If you want to see future videos like this, hit that subscribe
button, and if you have any other ideas or anything else that you want to learn about,
leave a comment down below. I read all of them and I'll add it to my list of videos to create
in the future. All right, well, that's all I have for you today. I'll see you next time. Bye.