Excel offers many different chart types—including column and bar graphs—to present your data. However, you don't have to settle for the preset column and bar layouts. Instead, you can swap ...

The bar graph needs to have a range of data before you can make it. 1. Highlight the range of data you want to represent. You can either click and drag for several neighboring columns.

Pie charts, like this one showing employment breakdown for a region, are notoriously difficult to parse. Notice how hard it is to pull out which employment category is highest or how they rank.