Inserting Charts in PowerPoint 2007
Author: Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: PowerPoint 2007
Date Created: April 12th 2007
Last Updated: February 25th 2009
Excerpt/Capsule:.
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.
- Select a cell in the Excel sheet, and enter the new value.
- 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.
