Sometimes you can give your charts a more impressive view by showing deviations of some real process from its expected flow.

When comparing two datasets, often the most important thing is to see the variance or differences in the datasets. Thus, when creating a comparative chart, in addition to displaying two sets of data, it is necessary to display their difference. Calculating and adding variance data to an Excel bar chart is quite simple. It is a little more difficult to calculate the distance from the compared datasets to the variance chart:

Gantt chart is a pervasive project management tool intended to reveal task management problems. Besides creating tasks on the Gantt chart, you can enrich it with additional information like project milestones, presentation dates, and similar events.

The thermometer chart (also known as a thermometer goal chart or progress chart) is an excellent indicator of the process with well-defined measures, e.g., task status. See also how to create a simple thermometer chart and twin or double thermometer chart. This tip will teach you how to make it more appealing to your audience.

Most reports and presentations contain a lot of boring charts that describe the state before and after some event, action, etc. However, using simple visual tricks, you can shake up the audience and draw attention to the essence of your presentation.

Nowadays, icons, logos, and abbreviations often carry more information than the textual names of companies, brands, applications, games, etc. To create memorable charts and faster understanding and recognition of information, instead of the names of countries, brands, etc., you can substitute the corresponding pictures on the axis of the charts.

Numerous users face a problem when, after inserting, deleting, and resizing some cells on a spreadsheet, Excel changes the dimensions of a chart, the position of a shape or image, etc. Objects in Excel are positioned on the drawing layer that covers cells on a worksheet.

PowerPoint offers a variety of predefined charts, pictures, texts, and diagrams, but still, many presentations look alike. This tip describes some of the features of PowerPoint that will allow you to create graphs and charts with chalk, pencil, or crayon effects, just like in childhood.

A bidirectional chart, also known as a two-sided bar chart, is used to compare two (rarely more) sets of data side by side along the horizontal axis. Unlike other similar charts, such as the divergent chart (butterfly, mirror, tornado, etc.) and the Likert scale chart, the bidirectional histogram bars start on opposite sides and are directed toward each other.

The tornado chart is a modified version of bar charts with two columns of data series whose bars are horizontal and pointing in opposite directions, with the base in the middle of the chart. In fact, the only difference between the tornado chart and the very similar charts - the butterfly chart and the mirror chart - is that the data series used to create the tornado chart must be sorted from the largest to the smallest.