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Excel - Mastering Excel Charting: Essential Tips for Organizing Your Data - Episode 469

2,911 views · Published 18 May 2009 · 3:58 · Indexed 22 September 2026

Channel: MrExcel.com · 2009 · Education

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Microsoft Excel Tutorial:  Mastering Excel Charting: Essential Tips for Organizing Your Data.

Welcome to the latest episode of the Learn Excel podcast! I'm your host, Bill Jelen, and today we have a special guest, John Peltier, the master of Excel charting. You can find more of his amazing work on his website, peltiertech.com. Trust me, all the cool charting tricks I know, I've learned from John.

In this episode, John will be sharing some valuable tips on organizing chart data. As he says, spending just two minutes setting up your data properly can save you hours of headaches down the line. So let's dive in and see what John has to say.

First and foremost, make sure your data is contiguous - no blank columns or rows. This will make it easier for Excel to parse the data and create accurate charts. Also, try to arrange your data in columns rather than rows, as it is consistent with how Excel handles databases. And here's a pro tip - leave the top left cell blank. This will help Excel understand that the first column contains category values and the first row contains series labels.

Now, let's see how this all works in action. John demonstrates by creating a chart with a sample data range. As you can see, Excel automatically selects the contiguous range and correctly identifies the series labels and category values. However, if we were to insert a blank row, Excel would only select the first five rows, as there is now a gap in the data. So remember, keep your data simple and organized to avoid any issues with charts, pivot tables, or formulas.

And that's it for today's episode! A big thank you to John Peltier for sharing his expertise with us. Don't forget to check out his website, peltiertech.com, for more amazing charting examples. And as always, stay tuned for more helpful tips and tricks on the Learn Excel podcast. See you next time!

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Our guest host today is Jon Peltier. Jon maintains an excellent set of charting examples at http://peltiertech.com/. In todays podcast, Jon discusses the best way to organize your data for charting. Episode 469 shows you how.

Table of Contents:
(00:00) Guest Introduction 
(00:19) Importance of Setting Up Data 
(00:29) Tips for Setting Up Data 
(00:39) Benefits of Simple Data Arrangement 
(03:16) Clicking Like really helps the algorithm

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