There are many ways to emphasize differences between data on the chart. You can add a threshold value using horizontal or vertical lines, highlight differences with a waterfall, individual values, and so on. Also, you can create a column chart in which the color of each column depends on the value displayed.

When Excel is installed, the default chart is a 2-D Column chart, but you can easily change the default chart type.

The Expressiveness of business graphics sometimes determines the success or failure of the presentation, and you can achieve a better perception of the audience by using in charts intuitively obvious representation of data by arrows.

A thermometer chart (also known as a thermometer goal chart or progress chart) is a kind of progress chart that shows the current completed percentage of the task or the value of any metric relative to the predefined value. E.g., the thermometer scale can display the sales plan status or client satisfaction rate.

A histogram chart visualizes the distribution of continuous data. Each column in the histogram chart represents the frequency (amount) of the data within the specific range.

When you create a thermometer chart, you are not limited to a single color bar. Instead, you can specify different colors for different value intervals. This tip shows you how to create a rainbow thermometer chart. E.g., working on some goal, you can specify risk zones for it: red zone - the risk of failure is high, yellow zone - success/fail is unknown, green zone - success is not far enough.

Sometimes you want to show a single chart with a series of different chart types. These charts containing data series with different chart types for each of them (lines, columns, areas, scatter, etc.) are called combo or combination charts:

Data visualization is a powerful cognitive tool that enables you to attract more attention to your statements. E.g., you can direct your organization's attention to insufficiently developed goals and praise them for successfully performed goals. This tip shows you how to update thermometer char colors automatically according to the current process status.

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.

Histograms show the distribution of numeric data, and there are several different ways how to create a histogram chart. Distributions of non-numeric data, e.g., ordered categorical data, look similar to Excel histograms. However, you cannot use Excel histogram tools and need to reorder the categories and compute frequencies to build such charts.