Graphs

Chart & graph overview

Google Sheets is a good tool for making customized and visually appealing graphs. I’mjust going to give a quick overview in this guide. If you’re looking for more information here’s information from Google Support on the types of charts & graphs in Google Sheets and how to add & edit a chart or graph.

In this example, I’m going to make a bar graph that shows each of the 2024 Oscar Best Picture nominees got from members of a local (and fictional) film club. To generate some data, each movie has been randomly assigned a vote total using =randbetween(1,10) just so it has a number for the graph.

1. To start, create a table with the information that you would like to show on your chart or graph. Use row and column headers where applicable, in this case “Movie” and “# Votes”.

2. Click and drag with your mouse to select your entire table, including the headings. Once selected, the table will appear in blue.

3. From the top menu, select “Insert” (circled in green below), then “Chart” (circled in blue below).

4. By default, it will generate a chart or graph right away; however it usually isn't exactly what you had in mind so some tweaking is needed. Select the chart type from the dropdown menu (circled in green below) on the top of the “Chart editor” pane that appeared on the right side of the screen. In this case, I’m going to change it from pie chart to bar chart (or column chart as google calls it here).

5. After selecting the chart type, you may want to play around with the options in the “Setup” and “Customize” tabs of the chart editor pane to edit the layout, colors, axes, style, and more. Usually I at least change the title and add data labels, but it is so dependent on the type of chart I’m making.

6. When you're done customizing, click anywhere in the main spreadsheet area (outside the chart editor pane) or click the x in the right corner of the pane to close it. Any changes you make will be updated automatically.

7. You’re done! You’ve now made a chart based on your table. Click and drag on the chart to move it around the spreadsheet. And you can click a corner or side of the chart to drag and resize it.

8. If you want to make any changes to your chart later, just double click on it to reopen the chart editor pane.

9. Your chart will update automatically as you edit the data in the table. Charts and graphs are great additions to dashboards, especially dashboards based on google forms, because they will be fully automated. Then, you will be able to just open the document at any given time to see the most up-to-date chart summarizing whatever you’re tracking.

10. This was a very brief introduction to charts and graphs. If you are interested in learning more, I encourage you to check out the google support links I included in the introduction to this section.