How many types of charts in Microsoft Office and what's your favorite?

You can draw on many different tools for creating charts and graphs, but Microsoft Excel remains one of the most powerful and functional of all of them. It allows you to visualize data in whatever format and style you want, as you’ll see below.

Column Charts

One of the most common charts used in presentations and dashboards, column charts are meant to compare values to each other. Usually these are values that have been categorized in some way. The most common subset for a column chart is one set of data broken up into categories.

Pie Charts

As the name implies, pie charts are shaped like a pie, and are best used when you need to show the amount of a much larger category that’s taken up by smaller sub-categories.

Line Charts

Moving on to line charts requires a new set of data because line charts and other similar chart types tend to be time-dependent. This means, you are usually (but not always) charting a data point over the progression of time.

Area Charts

Area charts are identical to line charts, but the area under the line is filled in. While the focus of the line chart is still change in values over time, the focus of an area chart is to highlight the magnitude of values over time.

Scatter (XY) Charts

A favorite among scientists and statisticians, scatter charts are plotted data points (usually a cluster of similarly measured data points), that are intended to show correlations or patterns in the data that aren’t obvious when you’re just looking at individual data points.

Bubble Chart

This can also be represented (even better) in the form of a bubble chart. This is a fun visualization to create when you have three dimensions of data you can plot.

Surface Charts

Just when you thought there couldn’t possibly be more charts available, here come surface charts. This three dimensional chart lets you plot two series of data points across several dimensions. It can be complex to use, but with the right data points (two series with a clear relationship), the visualization can be quite impressive.

Doughnut Charts

Doughnut charts are another complex visualization that lets you graph one data series in a sort of pie chart format, but also additional data series in “layers”, forming a multicolored “doughnut”. This is best used when the two data series are subcategories of a larger category of data.

There may be a nice selection of graphs to use, but what you should choose really boils down to the type of data sets you have available, and exactly what it is that you’re trying to show (or prove) with that data. Some charts will make your point much more clearly than others.

Knowing what chart will accomplish that is half the battle. The other half is figuring out exactly how to arrange your data and format the chart how you like.

Types of charts are;

Pie

Column

Line

Bar

Area

Scatter

I like area chart most of all.

Types of charts already explained in detail by the experts, My fav chart is Pie chart.

completely agree with the answer of Miss. Ghada Eweda.

There as different types of charts and almost i like all the charts.

Agree with expert ansewrs above

Answer update my skills and knowledge so keep it up Mr. Danish Shafiq for asking interesting questions which update our knowledge.

These six most common chart types supported by Microsoft Excel represented as follow:

A Pie Chart can only display one series of data. Excel uses the series identifier as the chart title (e.g. Flowers) and displays the values for that series as proportional slices of a pie. If we had selected multiple series of data, Excel would ignore all but the first series.

There are sub-types of the Pie Chart available. The second chart above is the Pie in 3-D and the third chart is an Exploded .

The Column Chart very effectively shows the comparison of one or more series of data points. But the Clustered Column Chart is especially useful in comparing multiple data series.

In the chart at right, we plotted the data points in all three series: Flowers, Shrubs, and Trees. Because Excel uses a different color for each data series, we can easily see how a single series, Flowers for example, changes over time. But because the columns are "clustered," we can also compare the three data series for each time period.

The Line Chart is especially effective in displaying trends. In a Line Chart, the vertical axis (Y-axis) always displays numeric values and the horizontal axis (X-axis) displays time or other category.

We selected the Line with Markers chart for our single series chart at left. You may choose each Line Chart type with or without markers. Markers are circles, squares, triangles, or other shapes which mark the data points. Excel displays a unique marker - different shape and/or color - for each data series.

The Bar Chart is like a Column Chart lying on its side. The horizontal axis of a Bar Chart contains the numeric values. The first chart below is the Bar Chart for our single series, Flowers.

When to use a Bar Chart versus a Column Chart depends on the type of data and user preference. Sometimes it is worth the time to create both charts and compare the results. However, Bar Charts do tend to display and compare a large number of series better than the other chart types.

All of the Bar Charts are available in 2-D and 3-D formats, but only the bars are 3-D. There is no 3-D Bar chart containing three axes.

Area Charts are like Line Charts except that the area below the plot line is solid. And like Line Charts, Area Charts are used primarily to show trends over time or other category. The chart at left is an Area Chart for our single series.

There are three charts available: the Area Chart, the Stacked Area Chart, and the 100% Stacked Area Chart. Each of these charts come in 2-D format and in true 3-D format with X, Y, and Z axes.

The chart at right is our 3-D Area Chart, and effectively displays our three series.

The purpose of a Scatter Chart is to observe how the values of two series compares over time or other category. To illustrate the Scatter Chart, we will use the worksheet values shown below:

Excel professionals can choose any type according to their preferences, features of each chart type and volume of data.Excel offers other chart types, depending on your version, but the average user will not use these types of charts. Some of the other available chart types are: Stock, Surface, Doughnut, Bubble, and Radar.

I agree with Mr Shameer answer's. Thanks for the invitation. .

I agree with answer mr shameer .

thanks for the invitation and i completely agree with the answer of Miss. Ghada Eweda..