Thinkabara

📗 Excel & Google Sheets for Students · Lesson 6 of 7

Charts for reports

Google Classroom

Pick the right chart, label it and keep it clean.

Choose the chart

Column/barCompare categories
LineChange over time
ScatterRelationship between two numeric variables (add a trendline)
HistogramDistribution of one variable
PieParts of a whole, only with few categories — often a bar is clearer

Label everything

  1. A title that states the finding: “Sleep drops during finals week”
  2. Axis titles with units: “Hours of sleep”, “Week of semester”
  3. A legend only if there is more than one series
  4. In reports: a figure number and caption (Figure 1. …)

Clean design

Remove 3D effects, heavy gridlines and unnecessary colors. Start bar charts at zero. Use one highlight color for what matters and gray for the rest.

Error bars

In science labs, add error bars (Excel: Chart Elements > Error Bars; Sheets: Customize > Series > Error bars) to show variability — standard deviation or standard error — and say which in the caption.

Tip

💡 Copy a chart into Word or Google Docs as a picture, or paste-link it so it updates when the data change.

✏️ Practice: your turn

  1. Make a line chart of something over time with axis titles
  2. Make a scatter plot and add a linear trendline
  3. Remove all chart clutter
  4. Write a figure caption for your chart

✏️ Online spreadsheet: practice formulas without installing anything

🧠 Quick quiz

Answer all 4 questions correctly to mark this lesson as done.

1. Best chart for change over time?
2. A good chart title…
3. Bar charts should start at…
4. Error bars show…

0 of 4 correct

All lessons in Excel & Google Sheets for Students

  1. 🎓 1. A grade tracker with weighted averagesSUMPRODUCT, absolute references and “what do I need on the final?”
  2. 🧪 2. Cleaning and formatting lab dataTables, number formats, rounding, sorting and filtering
  3. 🔀 3. IF, COUNTIF and AVERAGEIFLabel results and summarize by condition
  4. 🔍 4. XLOOKUP and VLOOKUPPull matching data from another table
  5. 🧮 5. Pivot tablesSummarize hundreds of rows in a few clicks
  6. 📊 6. Charts for reportsPick the right chart, label it and keep it clean
  7. 💵 7. Project: a student budgetIncome, expenses, categories, a pivot and a chart