Adding graphs and charts to your Microsoft Word documents can help visualize data, highlight trends, and make your reports more appealing and easy to digest.
With just a few clicks, you can create a variety of graphs in Word. This guide will teach you how to make different types of graphs, customize them, update the data, and use them effectively to enhance your Word documents.
Why Use Graphs in Word Documents
Before we dive into the steps to create graphs, let’s look at some of the key reasons to use them:
- Simplify complex data: Graphs allow you to present statistics, comparisons, trends etc. visually in an easy-to-understand format
- Enhance readability: Charts and graphs break up walls of text and engage readers by utilizing colors, shapes, lines – making your document more scannable
- Show relationships: The right graph can highlight correlations, changes over time, part-to-whole relationships effectively
- Grab attention: Adding relevant graphs makes your Word documents more visually appealing and helps highlight key points
How to Insert a Graph in Word
Adding a graph in Word is very simple:
- Click where you want to insert the graph – this sets the location
- Select the Insert tab and click Chart
- Select the desired chart type and format
- An Excel sheet will open up – enter your graph data here
- Close Excel to view your graph in Word
Let’s understand this process in more detail:
Step 1: Select Graph Location
Click on the Word document where you want the graph to be inserted. This sets the location for your chart.
Pro Tip: Add graphs close to relevant text/data for better context.
Step 2: Open Insert Chart Dialog Box
Go to the Insert tab in the Word ribbon and click the Chart button under Illustrations. This opens the Insert Chart dialog box.
Insert Chart Dialog box
Step 3: Select Chart Type and Format
The left panel of the dialog box lets you select from 11 major chart types like column, bar, line, pie etc. Pick the one that best represents your data.
Next, choose one of the sub-formats displayed on the right. For example, if you picked a clustered column chart, you can choose between 3D, cylinder and cone formats here.
Once done, click OK.
Step 4: Enter Data in Excel Sheet
An Excel sheet will open up with dummy data. Replace it with your own data that you want to visualize.
- Row 1 shows the legend labels
- Column A contains the category labels
- The plot area is where your actual graph data goes
Pro Tip: You can add or remove data by dragging the corner handles of selected cells in Excel.
Once your data is entered, close the Excel window.
Step 5: View Graph in Word Document
That’s it! Your chosen graph with the custom data will now be inserted at the location you had selected in Step 1.
Bar graph inserted in Word
The graph gets embedded in the Word document and will update if you edit the linked Excel data source.
How to Edit an Existing Graph
To edit a graph you’ve already inserted in a Word document:
- Select the graph by clicking on it
- Under Chart Design tab, click Edit Data button
- An Excel sheet will open up where you can modify your data
- Close Excel to apply changes
Additionally, with the graph selected, you can customize colors, styles, labels, position and many other options under the Chart Design and Format tabs.
Types of Graphs You Can Create in Word
Now that you know how to make and edit graphs in Word, let’s look at some of the commonly used chart types and when to use them:
- Column charts – Compare values across categories
- Bar graphs – Highlight differences between items/categories
- Line graphs – View trends over time, changes
- Pie charts – Show part-to-whole relationships
- Area charts – Emphasize volume of change
- Scatter plots – Correlate variable pairs
- Bubble charts – Display 3 variables (x, y values + bubble size)
- Stock charts – Plot stock prices over time
- Surface charts – Find optimal combinations between two sets of data
- Histogram – Frequency distribution of numerical data
- Combo charts – Combine two or more graphs for different aspects
Pick the one that can best demonstrate the story behind your data!
Graph Design Best Practices
Follow these tips to create stunning, effective graphs in Word:
- Label everything – add a title, axis labels, data labels, legend to provide context
- Ensure your choice of graph matches the data story
- Use minimal design with enough white space for clarity
- Vary colors meaningfully to highlight aspects (do not use more than 6 colors)
- Keep a common scale for accurate data representation
- Show full axis to avoid distortion
- Simplify non-essential elements like gridlines if needed
- Place close to relevant text for better understanding
Present Data Visually with Word Graphs
With an array of graph types and tons of customization options, you can create almost any chart in Word to engage your readers and help tell your data story visually.
So next time you need to showcase statistics, trends, relationships or comparisons in a report, essay or paper – turn your Word document into an infographic by adding relevant graphs using the steps covered in this guide!
