Need to create a simple bar chart with rows of data...

[thp510]

I'm stuck. I have several hundred rows of data with various columns (see example):

Date	Segment	Product	Sales Rep	Region	Sales
Jan-18	Enterprise	Widget 1	Bob	MW	$500
Feb-19	SMB	Widget 3	Cindy	NW	$250
Jun-18	SMB	Widget 3	Suzzie	SE	$1000
Jan-19	Commercial	Widget 2	Bob	SW	$35
Mar-18	Enterprise	Widget 1	Bob	SE	$355
Dec-18	Commercial	Widget 2	Kelly	NE	$535

<tbody>
</tbody>

I just want to create a simple bar charts from these several hundred rows. For example, I want to show our total sales over time so that the x-axis is the Date and the y-axis is the $ amounts, Sales. Similarly, I also want to create a bar chart that shows Segment on the x-axis and Sales on the y-axis. I try doing all this by just highlighting the sales column and the date column and inserting a bar chart using the data however it shows a very messy table looking chart instead (it's hard to explain). Am I doing something wrong? Do I need to clean this all up and sum the $ first before going and creating a chart?

 

[Panda514]

Hello,

I'm not sure what you are doing wrong. I copy/pasted your data into excel and it worked perfectly. I highlighted the Column A-Date, held down the Ctrl key and highlighted Column F-Sales, then clicked Insert, then clicked the Bar Chart symbol and I got a simple bar chart that shows Sales on the y axis and Dates on the X axis. I followed the same procedure for the second graph except I highlighted Column B-Segment first and then column F-Sales.