Home icon
Data Visualisation Guide

Microsoft Excel

1 minute read

Data visualisation tools

Paying, desktop app

microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/excel

Because it is so ubiquitous in the business world and outside of it, Excel is one of the most popular tools to produce data visualisations in the world. The interface for making charts is based on a gallery of chart types, but Excel users have been very creative in making many kinds of charts in Excel that are not part of the gallery offered by Excel.

Screenshot of the available chart types in Microsoft Excel

Available chart types in Excel. Source: Maarten Lambrechts, CC BY SA 4.0

Excel’s chart output is mainly static, but because Excel is so flexible, it can also be used to produce interactive charts and dashboards. However, the use of these is limited to Excel itself: you have to have Excel installed to open the file containing the interactive charts.

Related pages

RAWGraphs

Datawrapper

Flourish

RAWgraphs demo

The Chartmaker Directory

Grammar of Graphics in practice: Tableau

Data visualisation tools