How to Make a Chart in Google Sheets with ChatGPT
Wrestling with the Google Sheets chart editor can feel like a chore, full of endless clicks through menus just to visualize your data. Instead of spending time on a trial-and-error process, you can use ChatGPT as your smart assistant to turn raw numbers into clear, insightful charts in minutes. This article will show you exactly how to prompt ChatGPT to get step-by-step instructions for creating any chart you need in Google Sheets, from simple line graphs to more complex combination charts.
Why Use ChatGPT for Google Sheets Charts?
You might wonder why you should add another tool to your workflow. The traditional way of making a chart in Google Sheets involves highlighting your data, clicking "Insert" > "Chart," and then navigating the chart editor's tabs to get it just right. It's not necessarily difficult, but it can be time-consuming and frustrating if you're not sure which settings to change.
Using ChatGPT as a guide completely changes the experience. It flips the process from manually searching for features to simply describing the result you want. Here’s why it works so well:
It Saves Time and Reduces Guesswork: Instead of fumbling through menus, you can describe the chart you want in plain English. ChatGPT provides a direct, actionable list of steps, removing the frustrating guesswork from the process.
You Learn as You Go: By asking for specific charts, you’ll naturally learn about different chart types and customization options available in Google Sheets. ChatGPT can expose you to chart types you might not have considered, like scatter plots or combo charts, and explain when to use them.
It Acts as a Troubleshooting Assistant: Is your x-axis showing the wrong labels? Is your bar chart not displaying values correctly? Describe your problem to ChatGPT, and it can give you simple instructions to fix common formatting issues.
It Speeds Up Repetitive Tasks: Once you have a prompt that works for your regular monthly sales report, you can save and reuse it. This templating turns a 15-minute manual task into a 2-minute copy-and-paste job.
What You’ll Need to Get Started
Getting set up is incredibly simple. All you need are two things:
Your data in Google Sheets: Prepare a spreadsheet with your data organized into clean rows and columns. We’ll cover how to format this in the next section.
A ChatGPT Account: You can use the free version of ChatGPT for this. Just head over to the OpenAI website and create an account if you don't already have one.
That’s it. You don't need any special integrations or add-ons. You’ll simply be copying text from ChatGPT and following the instructions in your Google Sheet.
Step-by-Step Guide: Creating Your First Chart with ChatGPT
Let's walk through the entire process from start to finish with a practical example: creating a line chart to track monthly website traffic.
Step 1: Get Your Data Ready
The instructions ChatGPT provides will only work if your data is organized properly. For the AI to give you accurate steps, it needs to understand the structure of your sheet. Make sure your data follows these simple rules:
Use Headers: The first row of your data should be clear headers, like "Month," "Pageviews," or "Sales."
Be Consistent: Keep a single type of data in each column. For example, the "Month" column should only contain months or dates, and the "Pageviews" column should only contain numbers.
No Empty Rows or Columns: Make sure your data table is a clean block. Avoid any completely blank rows or columns in the middle of your dataset, as this can confuse the chart editor.
For our example, here is a simple dataset for website traffic in a Google Sheet. Column A contains the months, and Column B has the corresponding pageviews.
A | B |
Month | Pageviews |
January | 15,000 |
February | 18,500 |
March | 22,000 |
April | 21,500 |
May | 25,000 |
June | 28,500 |
Step 2: Craft a Good Prompt for ChatGPT
Your prompt is the most important part of this process. The more specific and clear you are, the better instructions you will get back. A good prompt should tell ChatGPT four key things:
Your tool of choice (Google Sheets).
The structure of your data (what’s in each column).
The type of chart you want (line chart, bar chart, pie chart, etc.).
The goal of your chart (what you are trying to visualize).
Here’s a great prompt for our website traffic example:
“I’m using Google Sheets, and I have data organized in two columns. Column A (“Month”) contains a list of months from January to June. Column B (“Pageviews”) contains the total pageviews for each month. I want to create a line chart to visualize the growth trend of pageviews over this period. Please provide clear, step-by-step instructions for selecting the data and generating the chart.”
Compare that to a weak prompt like: "How do I make a chart from my website data?"
The specific prompt gives ChatGPT all the context it needs to provide tailored, foolproof instructions that you can follow easily.
Step 3: Follow ChatGPT's Instructions
ChatGPT will process your prompt and provide a numbered or bulleted list of steps. It will likely look something like this:
Sure, I can help with that. Here are the steps to create a line chart in Google Sheets from your data:
First, open your Google Sheet.
Click and drag your cursor to select the range of data you want to include in the chart. For your data, that would be cells A1 to B7. Make sure you include the headers.
With the data selected, navigate to the menu at the top of the page and click Insert, then select Chart from the dropdown menu.
Google Sheets will automatically insert a default chart (often a column chart). Don't worry, we can change this easily.
A ‘Chart editor’ pane will appear on the right side of your screen. Under the Setup tab, find the 'Chart type' dropdown field.
Click on the dropdown and select Line chart from the list of options.
Your chart will now be updated to a line chart, showing the trend of pageviews over the months.
And that's it! In just a few seconds, you've gone from raw data to a professional-looking chart without guesswork.
Step 4: Make Finishing Touches
ChatGPT gets you 90% of the way in seconds. The final 10% is putting your personal touch on the chart to make it more readable. You can ask ChatGPT for instructions on this, too!
For example, you could ask a follow-up prompt: "How can I customize my chart? I'd like to change the chart title to 'Monthly Website Traffic (2024)', add data labels to each point on the line, and change the line color to blue."
ChatGPT will then guide you through using the "Customize" tab in the Google Sheets chart editor to change titles, colors, fonts, gridlines, and more.
Example Scenarios: From Bar Charts to Combo Charts
Once you get the hang of it, you can apply this method to any type of data visualization. Here are a couple of other common scenarios for marketing and sales:
Example 1: Bar Chart to Compare Sales by Product
Your Data: A Google Sheet with product names in Column A ("Product") and their total sales revenue in Column B ("Revenue").
Your Goal: To see which products are the top performers.
A Good Prompt: "I'm in Google Sheets. I have a list of product names in Column A and their sales revenue for the quarter in Column B. I want to create a horizontal bar chart to visually compare the sales performance of each product. Please provide the steps."
This will give you a perfect chart to see your bestsellers at a glance.
Example 2: A Pie Chart of Traffic Sources
Your Data: A Google Sheet with different website traffic sources in Column A ("Source") and the number of sessions from each in Column B ("Sessions"). Example sources could be Organic Search, Social Media, Direct, and Referral.
Your Goal: To understand the proportion of traffic coming from each channel.
A Good Prompt: "I have a Google Sheet detailing my website traffic. Column A lists the traffic source (e.g., Organic, Social, Direct) and Column B lists the session count for each. I need instructions for creating a pie chart that shows the percentage of total traffic each source is responsible for."
Example 3: A Combo Chart for Revenue vs. Ad Spend
Your Data: A sheet with three columns: "Month" (Column A), "Total Revenue" (Column B), and "Advertising Spend" (Column C).
Your Goal: To compare revenue and ad spend over time, even though the scales might be very different (revenue in thousands, ad spend in hundreds).
A Good Prompt: "In Google Sheets, I'm tracking monthly performance. Column A is the month, Column B is 'Total Revenue' and Column C is 'Advertising Spend'. I would like to create a combo chart. Can you give me the instructions to show 'Total Revenue' as columns and 'Advertising Spend' as a line on a separate, secondary axis on the right?"
This type of visualization is extremely valuable and often feels too complex to attempt manually. With ChatGPT, it's just a matter of asking correctly.
A Quick Word of Caution: Best Practices
While using ChatGPT this way is effective, keep these two points in mind for the best experience:
Verify the Output: ChatGPT is an AI language model, and while it's incredibly accurate most of the time, it's not looking directly at your screen. Sometimes, its instructions might be slightly outdated or misinterpret a very complex request. Always do a quick review to see if the chart it helped you create accurately reflects your data.
Don't Share Sensitive Data: This is a critical point. Do not paste any personal, confidential, or proprietary data into the ChatGPT prompt. You should only describe the structure of your data, as we did in the examples above (e.g., “Column A has dates, Column B has sales numbers”). There is no need for the AI to see your actual numbers for it to provide the right instructions.
Final Thoughts
Using ChatGPT as a guide for creating charts in Google Sheets takes the manual work and friction out of data visualization. By describing what you want in simple terms, you can produce professional charts in less time and with less stress, freeing you up to focus on the insights your data holds.
While this method makes manual reporting easier, we built Graphed to remove the manual steps completely. Instead of preparing data and describing chart instructions, you can connect your sources (like Google Analytics, Shopify, or even Google Sheets) directly to our platform. Then, you simply ask a question like, "Show me a bar chart of my top 5 traffic sources last month," and we instantly generate a live, interactive dashboard that updates automatically, saving you even more time.