For example, Column charts illustrate how data changes over time, but they’re also the best design to show comparisons among items. Bar charts are, essentially, just horizontal Column charts and ...

Enter the “ Column Column Chart ” in Microsoft Excel, a clever visualization technique that combines category-level data with overall totals to tell a more complete story.

For example, one data series in a line chart can represent actual profit and the second data series in a column chart can represent projected profits over time.

In this example, column A is too narrow, and columns B to D are too wide. Double-clicking the right edge of a column header resizes the column width to the largest value in that column.

Click the sheet tab in Excel for Mac 2011 that contains the chart you need to format. Double-click any bar in the column chart to open the Options panel. Reduce the value in the Gap Width field to ...

In PowerPoint 2003, Chart is in the Insert menu. Select a chart type; the example uses a Clustered Column. Then, click OK. PowerPoint will launch Excel, so you can enter the chart data.