How to Make a Graph

Turning a spreadsheet packed with numbers into an easy-to-understand visual is one of the most powerful skills you can learn. Graphs make data accessible, helping your team spot trends, compare results, and see the big picture at a glance. This guide will walk you through choosing the right type of graph and building it step-by-step in the tools you already use.

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First, Choose the Right Type of Graph

Before you even touch your data, you need a plan. The type of graph you use depends entirely on the story you want your data to tell. Are you showing growth over a quarter? Comparing the performance of different ad campaigns? Explaining how your budget is divided? Matching your goal to the right chart type is the most important step.

For Comparing Values Across Categories: Bar & Column Charts

When you need to compare distinct items against each other, bar and column charts are your best friends. They’re simple, familiar, and incredibly effective for showing highs and lows in your data.

• Column Chart (Vertical Bars): Use this when you have a handful of categories to compare, like website traffic by social media channel (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn) or revenue per product line. They’re especially good for showing change over a short period.
• Bar Chart (Horizontal Bars): A great choice when you have many categories or long category labels that would be hard to read vertically. Think website traffic by country or survey responses to a multiple-choice question.

Pro Tip: Always start the value axis (the one with the numbers) at zero. Starting it higher can distort the comparison and mislead your audience.

For Showing Change Over Time: Line & Area Charts

If your goal is to show a trend, line charts are the perfect tool. They instantly connect the dots, making it easy to see progress, patterns, and volatility over days, months, or years.

• Line Chart: Ideal for tracking continuous data. Use it to visualize new customers per month, your website’s daily active users, or your company’s stock price over a year. You can also plot multiple lines on the same graph to compare trends between different categories, like sales from your US and Canadian websites.
• Area Chart: This is a line chart with the space below the line filled in. An area chart is best used to show how parts of a whole change over time. For example, you could show total sales (the full area) and how different product categories contributed to that total over several quarters.

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For Displaying Parts of a Whole: Pie & Donut Charts

When you have data that represents percentages of a total, a pie or donut chart can show the composition clearly and simply. Their main job is to help viewers understand proportions at a glance.

• Pie Chart: The classic choice for showing how 100% of something is divided up, like the percentage of a marketing budget spent on different channels (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, content marketing) or the demographic breakdown of your customer base.
• Donut Chart: A stylistic variation of the pie chart. The hole in the middle allows you to display a key piece of information, like the total number of survey respondents or the total revenue figure.

Pro Tip: Avoid using pie charts if you have more than five or six slices – it becomes too difficult to compare the different sections. Also, make sure all your parts add up to 100%.

For Finding Relationships Between Variables: Scatter Plots & Bubble Charts

Sometimes you need to see if two different numbers are related. Do customers who spend more time on your website also buy more products? Does higher ad spend lead to more revenue? These charts help you spot correlations and outliers.

• Scatter Plot: This chart plots individual data points on a horizontal (x-axis) and vertical (y-axis). It’s perfect for seeing if one variable tends to increase or decrease as another does. A classic example is plotting a salesperson’s number of calls made vs. the number of deals they closed.
• Bubble Chart: A fun variation of the scatter plot that adds a third dimension: the size of the bubble. You could use this to visualize various ad campaigns, with ad spend on one axis, conversion rate on the other, and total revenue represented by the size of the bubble.

How to Make a Graph in Google Sheets: A Step-by-Step Guide

Let’s walk through creating a simple column chart in Google Sheets to show monthly sales data. It’s a quick and easy process.

Step 1: Get Your Data Organized

Your data needs to be clean and simple. Before anything else, arrange it in two columns. The left column should be your label (the x-axis), and the right should be the value (the y-axis).

For our example, Column A will be “Month” and Column B will be “Sales.”

Month         Sales
January       $12,000
February      $15,500
March         $14,000
April         $18,200
May           $21,000
June          $19,500

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Step 2: Highlight Your Data

Click and drag your mouse to select all the cells containing the data you want in your graph, including the headers (“Month” and “Sales”). This tells Google Sheets exactly what information to use.

Step 3: Insert the Chart

With your data selected, navigate to the top menu and click Insert > Chart. A chart editor sidebar will appear on the right, and Google Sheets will automatically create what it thinks is the best chart for your data (usually a line or column chart for this type of data).

Step 4: Customize Your Chart

Now you can make the chart your own. The Chart Editor has two main tabs: Setup and Customize.

• Setup: This is where you can change the chart type. If Google Sheets guessed wrong, you can pick a different one here. You can also edit the date range or check if your x-axis and y-axis are correct.
• Customize: Here’s where you fine-tune the visuals. You can change everything from colors and fonts to gridlines. The most important things to adjust are:

Once you are happy with how it looks, you can close the editor. Your chart will live in your sheet, and you can copy, paste, or download it for use in presentations and reports.

How to Make a Graph in Microsoft Excel: A Step-by-Step Guide

The process in Excel is very similar to Google Sheets, with only minor differences in where the menus are located.

Step 1: Organize Your Data

Just like in Google Sheets, make sure your data is structured logically in columns with clear headers. Let’s use the same monthly sales data.

Step 2: Select Your Data

Click and drag to highlight the range of cells you want to graph, including your headers.

Step 3: Insert the Chart

Go to the Insert tab in the main navigation ribbon at the top of Excel. In the “Charts” section, you will see icons for all the different chart types (column, line, pie, etc.). You can click the icon for the chart you want to use.

For more options, click on Recommended Charts. Excel will analyze your data and suggest a few formats that it thinks will work well. For our sales data, a “Clustered Column” chart is a perfect fit.

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Step 4: Customize and Refine Your Chart

Once your chart is created, it will appear in your spreadsheet. You can now edit its design and formatting. When you click on the chart, two new tabs will appear on the ribbon: Chart Design and Format.

• Chart Design: This is your main hub for customization.
• Format: This tab gives you more granular control over individual elements. You can click on a single bar, the chart title, or the background and change its shape fill, outline, and other visual effects.

Move and resize your chart as needed, and it’s ready to go! Like Google Sheets, charts in Excel are dynamic—if you update a number in your source data, the chart will automatically update to reflect the change.

Final Thoughts

Making a basic graph is a simple process, but creating a great one comes down to choosing the right format and styling it for clarity. By first defining the goal of your visual and then using the straightforward tools in Sheets or Excel, you can transform intimidating datasets into compelling visual stories anyone can understand.

While spreadsheets are great for building one-off charts, manually wrangling CSVs and updating reports every week can be a major time-sink. We built Graphed because we wanted to turn hours of data prep into a simple conversation. Just connect your platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, or Facebook Ads, and Graphed creates live, interactive dashboards for you in seconds – all by asking questions in plain English instead of clicking through endless spreadsheet menus.