Guide to Making Figures from Data in Excel
A. Scatter Plot
1. Highlight the data for the figure. Both x and y columns must be highlighted simultaneously. Press the “Scatter
with only Markers” button from the Scatter option of the Insert Tab.
2. The resulting default figure will not be as informative and interesting.
3. Left click on the generated figure. Provide an option to add axis titles by clicking on the primary horizontal
and vertical axis title options from the “Add Chart Element” drop-down box of the “Design” tab. Change the text
to the corresponding labels of the data headers (add units). There are some versions of Excel that do not have
the “Add Chart Element”; instead you see the “Design” tab, “Layout” tab
4. Directly delete most unnecessary elements such as “chart title” and “gridlines” by left clicking and pressing
delete. Remove the graph overall borderline as well by right clicking on the graph, pressing “format chart area”,
and choosing “no line” in the “border” option.
5. Most default figures will only have lightly colored lines and text. Change these to a formal “black” color by left
clicking on these elements, and changing the color either in the “format shape” box or in the “home” tab.
6. Maximize the space of the data points by removing the unnecessary blank space. You can do this by right
clicking on the axis, pressing “format axis”, and changing the values in the right option box provided.
REMEMBER: figures don’t necessarily need to have axes that begin at “zero value”.
7. Using excel, you can also press and hold your right mouse left click to “drag” the shape of the figure to
accommodate the general dimensional shape of your liking or to the publisher’s specifications. Excel usually
makes a rectangular shaped figure by default. You can also opt to add a trend line, using the “add chart
elements” at step 3.
8. Creating a bar graph follows the same editing steps and buttons to press as noted above. However, you must
first provide the central tendency (such as mean, median, mode) and dispersion information. An example would
be to use the “AVERAGE” and “STDEV.S” functions. Just make sure to follow the syntax provided.
9. Many times you may need to produce some summarized information first from your summary data table
before you can create a meaningful graph. Compute the mean (average) of each group. Highlight the group
names and averages of the variable you want to graph; click “Insert” tab, select column or bar graph.
10. By following the previous steps highlighted, we can create a better colored and shaped graph. There may be
times, wherein we need to change the labels. We can use the “Select Data” option, after right clicking the graph.
Press “edit”, and designate the cells containing male and female as the “axis label range”.
11. You can also add in the error bars through the “add chart elements” button. Just be sure to designate the
dispersion data through “specify value”. You can do this by right clicking on the generated default error bar, to
get to the left formatting box.
12. At times, you may need to get total counts of data values that are not actually numbers. With this you can use
the “COUNTA” function. You can then use the summarized counts to create a bar chart of total counts.