Hi everyone, Kevin here. Today, we’re going to learn how to make bar charts and also column charts in Microsoft Excel. A bar chart displays your data horizontally while a column chart displays your data vertically. Along with these, we’ll also look at how you can make multiple-column charts and also stacked-column charts. Let’s check out how to do this. Here I am in Microsoft Excel, and if you would like to follow along today, you can click on a link to this workbook down below in the description of this video. Here, I have sales data for the Kevin Cookie Company in a table, and I could try to make sense of this data simply by looking at it, but I think a visual or a chart would help me understand this data a lot better. To insert a chart, simply click anywhere within your data. You could highlight all of it, or you could simply click into one of the cells. Up on the top tabs, let’s click on the one called Insert, and right here in the center, we have a category for charts. I think a bar chart or a column chart would work well for this. Right up here, I see a column chart. I’ll click on this, and this opens up all of my different options. Right up on top, I have my column charts, and this shows vertical bars, and here I have a few different variations. On the next row, I could also shift it into 3D, and right down here, I also have a bar chart, which is horizontal data bars. Down below, I also have a 3D option. Now, I think the vertical bars work well, so I’ll click on this one. And look at that. Just like that, we now have a column chart inserted onto the worksheet, and this helps me understand the data a lot better. Here, for example, I can see that chocolate chip is by far our best seller. Now, you might be wondering, well, what if actually another chart type works better? For example, what about a bar chart? To switch the chart type, make sure that this chart is selected, and up on the top tabs, you’ll notice that you have two new tabs. You have one for chart design and one for format. Make sure that you’re in chart design, and over on the right-hand side, you have the option to change the chart type. Let’s click on that. This opens up a dialogue where we can see all the different chart types within Excel. Currently, it’s set to a column, and here we see a few different variations of a column chart, but you could also switch it to, let’s say, a line chart, a pie chart, and right here, we have the option for a bar chart. Let’s select this option for the bar chart. Here, if I hover over, I get a larger preview, and down in the right-hand corner, let’s click on OK. It’s now inserted a bar chart, and instead of showing the data bars vertically, it’s now showing all of them horizontally. Now, personally, I prefer a vertical presentation of the data bars, but there are some cases where a bar chart actually works better. You might be wondering, well, when is that? Let’s click into the worksheet titled bar chart to see when that is. On this worksheet, I have similar data, except you’ll notice that this list of cookie names is far longer. Here, if I scroll down, the list keeps going. If we scroll down just a little bit, here, I’ve inserted a column chart showing all of the sales and the associated cookie names. If you look at the cookie names, it’s a little hard to parse what it says in this vertical format. Instead, with a bar chart, and I’ll scroll down a little bit more, here, it’s a lot easier to comprehend the cookie name and also the associated sales. So, especially when you have long labels and you have lots of different categories, a bar chart tends to work better. Otherwise, a column chart will work just fine. Let’s jump back into the first worksheet. Back on the first sheet, I now want to show you an extremely fast way to insert a column chart. Let’s select this bar chart that we inserted and with this entire object selected, hit the delete key, and that will remove the chart. Place your selection anywhere within the data table and then press the shortcut key Alt together with F1 and just like that, we now have a column chart. It really couldn’t be any easier. Looking at this chart, it’s not entirely clear what this number signifies. Ideally, I would like to also include an axis title here to make it really clear that these are cookies sold. With the chart selected, up on top, make sure that you’re in the chart design tab and all the way over on the left-hand side, we have an option for add chart elements. I’ll click on this and here you can add all sorts of different elements to your chart or you could also remove elements. Right here, there’s a category for axis titles and here, if you hover over, you can see what exactly it’ll do. When I hover over primary horizontal, there you’ll see it added a horizontal label or here, primary vertical, and there it adds an axis title there. I’ll select this and I can double-click in and I can enter in some text. Let me put in number of cookies sold. Now, instead of going up to the top ribbon to do this, you can also click into the chart and over on the right-hand side, you get this plus icon. When I click on this, here too, I can also add and remove the different chart elements. So, you have multiple ways to do the same exact thing. Instead of adding elements on your own, up on chart design, over on the left-hand side of the ribbon, you can also explore what’s called quick layouts. When I click on this, this offers to very quickly change your design. It adds and removes different elements and here you can go through and look at some of the different options. Chances are you’ll find one of these layouts that matches exactly what you want. For now, I’ll leave it as is. To the right, you also have different options like being able to change the color of your chart and here you could hover over and preview what that’ll look like. And over here, we also have different styles. For example, maybe this one with the gradient background and some shadows behind the bars, I think that looks attractive. All in all, this chart is looking fantastic but I do want to update the title and this is a really neat trick. I would like the title of my chart to match the text that you see here. Now, of course, I could click into this cell and I could copy the text and then paste it into here but an even easier way to do this. Here, I’ll make sure that this element is selected. Up above in the formula bar, click into there and then enter an equal sign. Then, I’ll click into this cell and it’ll place the value of this cell as the title within this chart. I’ll press enter and here we see that it’s automatically pulled in this text. Now, one of the really neat things, I’ll pull this down just a little bit, if I now change this text, let’s say instead of 2026, this is actually 2025. When I update the value of that cell, here it automatically updates the title of this chart. That’s pretty cool. Let’s now jump into the worksheet titled multiple columns. On this next worksheet, up above, I have the same type of data as what I had on the previous sheet, except you’ll notice I now have an additional year’s worth of data. So ideally, I would like to show a column chart with two years’ worth of data. To insert a column chart, let’s use that shortcut key. Simply place your selection anywhere within this data table and then press Alt F1 on your keyboard and look at that. There we have our column chart and it’s showing us multiple columns of data. So here for chocolate chip, I could see what our sales were in 2025. That’s a dark blue color. And then in 2026, we see the chocolate chip sales numbers and it looks like we had quite the increase. Now, down below, if we look at this, it’s currently grouping all of the data by the cookie type. So here I see chocolate chip with 2025 and 2026, and then we see it across all the different cookie types. But maybe you would prefer to see it grouped by year. Currently, the year is the legend. With the chart selected, let’s go up to the top tabs and click on Chart Design. And right over here in the data category, you have the option to switch the rows and the columns. So, what does that mean? Let’s click on this. Now, if we look down below, here it’s categorizing by the year. So here we have all of the different cookies in 2025 and all of the different cookies in 2026. And now all of the cookie names show up in the legend. You can simply click on this button and you can toggle back and forth between these different views. You’re simply changing the way that it categorizes the data. So here I’ll stick with this view by year. I’d like to make a few additional tweaks to this chart. For example, chocolate chip is by far our best-seller, but I would like to represent it as, say, a brown color just to match what a chocolate chip cookie looks like. To format or change the color, I’ll select this data bar. And when I click on this, you’ll notice that it selects all of them. Now, one thing to be aware of, if I click on this again, it’ll deselect this first one. So just make sure that you click on it once and it’ll select all the data bars of this type. Up on the top tabs, let’s click on format, and over here, I can adjust the shape fill. I could choose from any of these colors, but down here, I see the chocolate chip cookie brown that we like here at the Kevin Cookie Company. I’ll click on this. Alternatively, to change the color, I could also right-click on this, and here too, I also have the option to adjust the fill. So, a few different ways to get to that same option. Here, I’ll click out of that. I can also adjust the width or the thickness and also the gap of these bars. To access all of the formatting functionality, I’ll simply double-click on this bar, and this opens up a pane over on the right-hand side where I can format the data point. I can go through and you could adjust things like the fill, the borders. Here, you can apply a shadow or a glow, but right here, let’s go to the series options. And over here, I can adjust the series overlap. Here, when I move this down, you’ll notice that the spacing between the different bars increases. Or here, I could reduce the amount of spacing that’s there. So here, there’s very little spacing. Down here, you could also adjust the gap. The gap is between these two different years. Here, I could reduce the gap, or here, I could also expand the gap. So, you can play with these to get it to look exactly how you want it to look. Right up on top, I’ll close out of this pane. Looking over at my chart, it appears that 2026 is larger than 2025, but it’s hard to know to what extent. A stacked column here can really help us visualize this data better. With this chart selected, let’s click on the tab titled Chart Design. And right here, let’s change the chart type. I’ll click on this. This opens up the dialogue with all the different chart options. Right at the very top, let’s click on Column. And the second option is what’s called a stacked column. I’ll select this and then click on OK. And just like that, I can now see 2025 data and 2026 data. So here I can tell exactly how much greater 2026 was compared to 2025. But along with that, I can also get a sense for how much each cookie type contributed to the number of cookies sold for that specific year. So, this is another valuable chart view that you can use. All right, well, hopefully, you were able to make a bar chart or a column chart that visually represents your data. To watch more videos like this one, please consider subscribing and I hope to see you in the next video.