When you present your work to other people, you will want it to be as clear and appealing as possible. Graphing your work can help to convey your message while providing a visually stimulating medium for your audience.

Excel provides a Chart Wizard which is a great help in developing informative graphs. Use the Chart Wizard to create your intial graph, then edit the graph as you wish.

The following practice exercise will help you to create a graph of your data using the RA and TA Salaries worksheet that we have been working on:

1. Click on the Chart Wizard icon button located on the toolbar or select Insert, then Chart from the Menu Bar.

2. When the dialog box opens, select the type of graph you want and click on Next. In our example, let's choose the 3-D bar chart. How? Highlight Bar in the box on the left. A group of images will appear in the box on the right which shows you the different types of "Bar" graphs available. Click on any of the sub-types, and a description of the way the data will be viewed is given in the dialog box. To view a sample, click on the button that says "Press and hold to view sample". The dialog box will actually display YOUR data in the format you have selected. In our practice, let's choose the bottom left display, a clustered bar with 3-D effect. Click on Next.

3. The next dialog box will display the data range that Excel chooses for you. You can accept this range, or enter one of your own. Verify that the data range entered is $A$14:$B$16 and that the "Series in:" radio button for Columns is selected. Click Next.

4. Enter a chart title in the dialog box, Annual RA/TA Salary Statistics. Click Next.

5. Last, tell Excel where you want to display the chart ... on a separate page or right along with the data for the chart. In our example, choose "as object in . . ." and the default entry. Click Finish. The chart box will appear in your data sheet with "handles" on it. To move the box, hold your left mouse button down in the white space of the chart. A crosshair will appear. Drag the box where you want it on the page.

6. If you wish to resize the chart object, click in the chart space to see the handles on the chart, then place your mouse pointer in the corner of the object until you see a two-headed diagonal arrow. Hold your left mouse button down and drag in or out to resize the chart.

7. To change parts of the chart (title, series, etc.), move your mouse pointer within the chart until an identification box pops up for that section, then double click in that area of the chart. An editing window will appear for that part of the chart.

If you are not familiar with using charts to display data, practice with some real data. Play with the different types of charts and try using different data series to see how the data is displayed. With practice, you will learn how to specify data series, even if Excel doesn't give you the default data range correctly.

Remember, it's easy to undo a mistake. Just click on the Undo button in the Toolbar, or click Back in the Chart Wizard dialog box.

Here's a sample of what the completed worksheet might look like: