How to Add Your Very Own Custom Charts to Your Blog

Are you creating blogs about market reports in your area?  Here is a slick way to create your very own custom charts, and put them in your blogs.

If you have Microsoft Office, and most Realtors do, then making your very own charts is a snap.  First think of the information you wish to present, and how it will be most valuable and interesting to the reader.  Next open Microsoft Excel, and create your very own data table.  Once you create the data table save it as a template before entering your data.   Bold the side and top Labels of your data row title and data column titles so that the chart wizard will know these are your row and column lables.  Next copy the template to a new Excel file and get ready to enter the data.  Once you have entered all the data into your table you are ready to create a chart.  Simply click on one of the cells of data in your table and go to the chart feature in Excel.  Click on the chart you think will best display the data.  Don't like what you see?  Pick a different chart and see if the data is presented in a way that will make sense.  Remember the empirical formula in math, simplest is best.

Once you have a chart that you are happy with, this is just the beginning of the customization you can create for your chart.  A slick trick when dealing with MS Office products is to go to the chart and right click in different regions of the chart.  For Example if you right click on the border of the chart, the graph background area, or the graph itself, you will quickly learn that a small command box pops up with a variety of options for manipulating the chart so it looks just the way you would like.  Play with all the different command options for the chart to quickly learn where to go to make what changes such as Chart title, data lables, graph colors, graph increments and more. Every component of the chart can be customized, but you will have to play around to see which right click menu serves up the results you are seeking for your chart.

Now that you have a chart that you love, the rest is easy, save your worksheet as a web page on your computer and then go to the files for that web page to grab the image to insert in your blog. You will see two chart image file formats that are web friendly: a gif and a png file format.  Choose the one that works best for you.

Need more detailed step by step instructions?  Here is the Excel 2010 Help feature for charts: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/CH010369001.aspx

Happy charting.