LibreOffice ~ 100% Free A Complete Office Suite that is 100% Free! Word Processing Spreadsheet Editor Presentation Creator Drawing Program 100% Compatable with Microsoft Windows® 100% Free

Clicking this Download button starts InstallIQ™, it manages Libre Office your installation. Learn More

LibreOffice Calc Tutorial #6 – Creating Charts

What we have here is a great free spreadsheet application from the LibreOffice suite. Calc offers a comprehensive set of features and tools that will make spreadsheet creation, edition and management really intuitive and easy tasks. I this tutorial I will show you how to create amazing charts.

Before we start with the tutorial may I recommend that you have LibreOffice ready to work in your computer. If you don't, just click on the “Download” button above to get your 100% free and fully-featured latest version of this powerful office suite.

Let's say you already have a spreadsheet with some data in it and you want to create a chart to make that data more visible or understandable.

First of all, select the range of cells that contain the data for your chart including the titles.

Go to “Insert” and select “Chart...” in the menu bar.

The “Chart Wizard” dialog will appear. Notice that the chart has already being created and you can see it in the spreadsheet, it is in its default configuration, a column chart and in most cases it is a fairly good option.

But let's see which other options we can find in the wizard: on the left panel you have the chart type (column, bar, pie, line, etc) and in the right panel the type options, there is also a check-box for 3D look and if you check it more options appear by unfolding menu next to it.

As you can see the preview changes as you select the different options. Click “Next” for more options or “Finish” if you are satisfied.

In the second step you can range (the range of cells that contain the data to be displayed in the chart), you can also define the data series (columns or rows) and if the first row and first column are going to be as labels. In most cases you do not need to change anything here. Click “Next”.

The Data Series is used when several data sets come into play, does not apply in this case, Click “Next”.

The fourth and last step is for “Chart Elements”: here you can add a title, a subtitle, Display the legend (or not), add descriptions for the X, Y and Z axis and choose which grids should be displayed or not. Click “Finish” and voilà!!

Final Words

Now you have the basic knowledge to create amazing charts for your spreadsheets, in upcoming tutorials I'm going to show you how to improve them with Calc´s advanced chart edition tools. Get Calc by installing LibreOffice, just click the link below, it's free and not even a registration process is required to download and install.

Clicking this Download button starts InstallIQ™, it manages Libre Office your installation. Learn More