A chart is a sentence. Before you make one, you should be able to say the sentence out loud: “sales grew steadily until March, then stalled.” If you can’t say it, you don’t need a chart yet — you need to look at the data longer. If you can say it, the chart’s only job is to make that sentence land in two seconds, honestly.
Most bad charts fail one of those two words. They either don’t land (clutter, wrong type) or they aren’t honest (axis games). Both are fixable with a small set of habits.
Pick the chart by the sentence, not the gallery
Excel offers you sunbursts, radar charts and 3-D cones. Ignore the gallery and match the shape of your sentence:
| Your sentence sounds like… | Use |
|---|---|
| “X is bigger than Y” | Bar chart, sorted |
| “It changed over time” | Line chart |
| “These two things move together” | Scatter plot |
| “It’s made up of parts” | Stacked bar — or just a table |
That covers perhaps 95% of working life. Notice what’s missing: pie charts survive only for “one number dominates” with two or three slices, because humans can’t compare angles. And anything 3-D exists to make numbers feel impressive rather than be readable — the tilt literally distorts the values. A useful reflex: the fancier the chart type, the more suspicious the sentence.
Two small craft rules with outsized payoff. Sort your bars — alphabetical order answers no question anyone asked; sorted by value, the ranking is the chart. And label lines directly at their ends instead of using a legend — every legend lookup is a round trip your reader shouldn’t pay for.
The axis is where charts lie
Here is the one piece of chart ethics everyone should know. A bar chart’s value axis must start at zero. A bar encodes its value in its length — start the axis at 480 and a difference of 4% looks like a factor of three.
Line charts get more latitude — a line encodes its value in position, not length, so zooming the axis to show the shape of a trend is legitimate. Latitude is not immunity: a line zoomed until routine noise looks like a cliff is the same trick in a different coat. If the wiggle only matters at 10× zoom, say so on the chart.
Excel’s part in this: it auto-truncates axes when values sit far
from zero. It’s not malicious, but it means honest people publish
lying bar charts by default. Check Format Axis → Minimum and set
it to 0 yourself.
Delete your way to a good chart
Excel’s default chart arrives wearing everything it owns: gridlines, legend, border, tick marks, a title that says “Chart Title”. The craft is subtraction. My routine, in order:
- Delete the legend — label the data directly.
- Fade or delete gridlines — if precise values matter, add data labels to the few points that matter instead.
- Mute every colour except the story. One series in brand colour, the comparison series in grey — the compound-growth chart is exactly this pattern.
- Retitle with the sentence. Not “Sales 2025–2026” but “Sales stalled in March”. The title is the one part everyone reads; spend it.
Each deletion raises the signal. A chart is finished not when there’s nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing left to take away — and yes, that’s borrowed from an aviator, and yes, it’s true about spreadsheets.
Wire it to living data
A chart built on A2:B13 is a snapshot that rots. Build charts on a
Table
or a PivotTable and
new rows flow in automatically — the July report becomes “refresh,
read, send”. Static ranges are how offices end up with a chart
titled Q3 that quietly still shows Q2.
Charts sit in stage five of the path because they come after clean data and honest aggregation — a chart can only be as truthful as the table underneath it.
Say the sentence. Pick the shape. Zero the axis. Delete the rest.