Category Archives: Bar charts

How to Create a Bar Chart

Hello and Welcome.   Have you ever gone to your local bar for a drink ?   How about a nice restaurant that has a bar at one end where everyone seems to be cheering on the sports on the large screen ?  Well, I have been to a few and they are a lot of fun.  It never occurred to me until recently that all bars go across, horizontally.  Of course, I bet you have never seen a bar that goes vertical, like a column, right ?   So, if you ever need to know “How to Create a Bar Chart” then just think of your local bar because that is the same type of structure.  You have the long table going from left to right, and then you have the stools, all lined up, going across from left to right.  That’s the same structure for a Bar Chart.

So let’s begin, by thinking that Joe owns the “Bar and Grill” restaurant, and of course Joe sells so many drinks.   He sells many of the popular drinks like Gin % Tonic, Bloody Mary, Margaritas, and more.   Why not take a look at this sales for the past three months to see how he’s doing ?

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Wow.  As you can see, the bar is not doing too bad.  Like I said before,  these are his most popular links.  Now, I want you to forgive me for the next statement, but I can’t resist:  “Let’s make a Bar chart based on the the drinks Joe has sold at his bar for the last three months”.

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I’m sure that you see that I did not highlight the whole table.  The cells with the totals are not highlighted because then the wrong information would be displayed in the Bar Chart.   So, starting at cell A2, going across to D2, and then scrolling down to cell D8.  This will get the titles of each column, the names of all of the drinks, and the number of sales of each drink, for the months of April, May and June.