Before You Begin: If the data on which you want to base your chart
is already available within Excel 2007, create your chart in Excel,
and then copy-paste it into a PowerPoint slide.
Follow these steps to inserting a new chart in PowerPoint
2007:
Create a new presentation in PowerPoint, or open an existing presentation.
When you insert a new slide in PowerPoint, it uses the default Title
Slide layout.
Note: Learn more about
inserting a new slide in PowerPoint 2007 here...
Click the Layout button/option in the Home tab of the
Ribbon to bring up the Layout gallery as shown in Figure
1.
Select
any of the layouts that include a content placeholder (the
small palette like collection of multicolored buttons visible
on some of the slide layouts shown in Figure 1).
Figure 1: Choose a slide layout
If your slide layout has a content placeholder, click the chart
button among the six buttons in the content placeholder
that you can see
in
the
slide within Figure 2.
Figure 2: Content Placeholder
Alternatively,
if you want to insert a chart in an existing slide that has no
content placeholder, just select the Insert tab of the Ribbon,
and click the Chart button, as
shown
in Figure
3.
Figure 3: Insert Chart
Either of these options opens the Insert Chart dialog box
that you can see in Figure
4.
Figure 4: Insert Chart
The left column lists the types of charts that you can create
in PowerPoint -- and the area towards the right shows several
chart possibilities using a selected chart type.
Select a particular chart variant -- if you can't find the chart variant you
want, just choose something similar to the one you want (editing it later which is
easy). Click OK.
This will place a chart on the slide that is based on dummy
data. At the same time, this launches Microsoft Excel in a separate
window as
shown
in Figure 5, containing the dummy data of
the chart.
Figure 5: Chart and Excel with default values
Note: If you don't have Excel 2007 installed on the same system
as PowerPoint 2007, then you'll see Microsoft Graph instead
of Microsoft Excel -- this works exactly the same way as in
versions 2002 and 2003 of PowerPoint -- look here...
You now need to replace the dummy data in the Excel sheet
with your own data. Follow these
guidelines:
Select a cell in the Excel sheet, and enter the new value.
You can move to the cell towards the right in the Excel
sheet by pressing the tab button. Or move to cell down by
pressing the Enter (Return) key.
To insert a new column in the Excel sheet, right-click
the header of the next column and choose the Insert option.
To insert a new row in the Excel sheet, right-click the
header of the next column and choose the Insert option. Remember,
column or row content inserted this way ends up as a new
series value in your chart.
You can also delete columns and rows -- just select the row or column header, right-click, and choose the Delete option.
Refer to Figure 5 above which has default
chart values, the changed values can be seen in Figure
6.
If you can't see the values in Figure 5 because
they are so small in size, just trust me when I say the values
were different from what you see in Figure 6!
Figure 6: Changed values
Any changes you make in the Excel sheet (refer to Figure
6 above) will reflect as changes on the chart
within PowerPoint, as shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7: Updated chart in PowerPoint
Close Microsoft Excel to apply those changes on the chart (see Figure
8).
Figure 8: Inserted Chart
To make more changes, select the chart so that the Ribbon
area shows the Chart Tools Design tab as shown
in Figure 9. Now click the Edit
Data button -- this opens
the Excel sheet again, where further changes in the values
can be made.
Figure 9: Edit data
Tip: You can also right-click the chart, and choose the Edit
Data option to achieve the same result.
