Adding a graph in Microsoft Word 2016

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at making this pretty little graph, and inserting it into a Word document. So let's go and do that now.

First up, let's put a 'return' in, this is where I want my graph to go, and I'm going to go to 'Insert', and-- Word calls them charts not graphs, so go to 'Charts', and here's your basics, so we've got column, line, and pie charts, these are the ones you're probably going to use the most of, within here, say the pie charts--there's a couple of different ways of displaying this data, so decide which one you're going to use, I'm going to use the plain old 'Column' graph, this one here, click 'OK', and it inserts it.

It's given me this little Word document, sorry, this little Excel bar document, and it's gone and inserted it into my document, so I'm going to make it a little bigger. You can adjust the size, it puts it in the width of your column or your page by default, but you can drag it out to any old size. I'm going to use this one. It's given me some kind of place holder text, you could now just jump into Excel, copy the data, and replace it in here. We'll do that in the next video, we'll look at it a bit more advanced using Excel, connecting it up.

What I'm going to do is, I'm just going to go through and delete a few things. I'm going to select these three, I’m going to right click them, and say, 'Delete', 'Columns', you can see, it's just kind of a regular bar chart now. Now, instead of 'Series 1', this is going to be 'Gross Profit'. And what I'll do is I'll put in 2014, 2015... You can see, they’re adjusting across here. I've spelt gross profit wrong, you can see that too. And I'm just going to put in some data here, 400,000, 425,000, then we jump to a massive three quarters of a million, and now we've gone back. 

So we've got some data in there. Let's make this a bit bigger so you can start to see if you got a longer content. Some of the things you can change, that you want to change is-- I'm going to close this down, and then, what happens, a lot of people, they close it down, and they want to go and change this. To go and change it afterwards-- you might be at 'Home', you might have somebody else's chart. What you do is you click on the graph once, then you go along to 'Design', then this one that says 'Edit Data', click it up, magic, your little window pops back up again. So, if you lose it, that's what you can do to open it.

Let's go and do some style changes. So, with it selected, what you can do is double click this green bar here, and you can start playing around with these options, so 'Fill', there's some shapes, and here’s my bar graph. So what I want to do is actually go to this first one here, go to 'Fill', it's got an 'Automatic', it's using some of my default kind of faint colors, what I want to do is, I actually want to put a 'Solid fill' in, and I want to tell it what to do. So I can pick any of my colors here, I’ll pick these guys. I'm also going to-- there's some other things you can do, so say, 'Vary colors by point', watch this, you can start having kind of more of-- you see, it's automatically added a key down the bottom with different colors, just to help you work out what's what. 

You might like that, you might not like that, there might be just some features on here from your graphic you just don't want, and that's where this little option down the bottom here is, 'Chart Filters'. You can say, I want-- actually, that's slightly different. I want this one here, 'Chart Elements'. Let's say I want them but I don't want the legend, which is the key, because somebody will be able to work it out. I just want the colors because they look cool. So I've turned that off, you can see, you can turn on and off, all sorts of different things in here.

Next thing I want to do, or the last thing that you might want to do with your graph is-- I know there's an option here, it's says 'Chart Styles', this is one cool thing you can start with. By default it looks fine, looks perfect. You might go through and say, "Actually I'm liking this thing." You can start from here, you can obviously adjust it from here as well. You can double click it, double click to see this here, and go through and start adjusting colors and fills like you did before, but-- might get you really close to the thing you want to start with.

So that is how to insert a chart using Word. We're going to look at tying it into an Excel document a little bit more tightly in the next video. Let's go and do that.