How to eliminate clutter from Excel graphs

Strip away unessential elements in your charts to allow the data to stand out and make it easier for your audience to interpret. This video walks through 7 steps to declutter your Excel graphs.
JUMP TO THE SECTION THAT INTERESTS YOU
00:00 Intro
00:50 Why declutter?
01:44 Steps to declutter
01:48 Excel how-to: Eliminate borders & gridlines
02:58 Excel how-to: Clean up axis
05:32 Excel how-to: Limit data labels & markers
06:34 Excel how-to: Move the legend
07:49 Excel how-to: Create a clear title
09:00 BONUS: chart templates
09:53 Recap and outro
BONUS RESOURCES
● 5 tips to identify and reduce clutter: • How to declutter data ...
● Declutter! (and question default settings): www.storytellingwithdata.com/...
● How-to label directly in Excel: www.storytellingwithdata.com/...
● Axis vs data labels: www.storytellingwithdata.com/...
● Title alignment: www.storytellingwithdata.com/...
● Declutter and Focus: Empirically Evaluating Design Guidelines for Effective Data Communication: visualthinking.psych.northwes...
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[@Anikvikram]

Thanks it's very helpful

[@chatoba3298]

The final chart looks amazing and is easy to read and understand. Thank you!

[@brendamg7298]

thanks

[@ayomide1007]

The final result was really clean, but won't it be better to label some points, like the high points in 2021 and a point where it fell, then where it fell beyond 2020 and also where in 2020 began to sell more than 2021, won't that further tell a story and grasp the attention and imagination? , sorry this was long

[@srsr4271]

how to use abbreviations for months?

[@storytellingwithdata]

Great question! Here (at 05:01 in the video), I adjusted the month field to a three-letter abbreviation. There are a couple of ways to apply this abbreviation in Excel.
In this particular case, the field was already text, so I manually typed "JAN" in the first cell at the top of the data table. After that, select the "JAN" cell, then click on the lower right of the cell outline and drag it down through December to apply the same formatting across all rows (this saves time manually typing them all out).
Alternatively, if you have a date field, you could use the formula: =UPPER(TEXT(your_date_field_here, "mmm")). You can find more Excel date functions at support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/date-and-time-functions-reference-fd1b5961-c1ae-4677-be58-074152f97b81.

[@paulanthonylake]

I know from experience that some of my audience prefer to see the details.
While I see situations where both the cluttered and the decluttered graphs are required, my question is, how do we find balance?

[@storytellingwithdata]

Great question Paul and this is a common one because often we have to dip into our "change management" toolkit to garner acceptance. You might find the tips in this video helpful-I'd point you to timestamp 06:06 #2 - show the side-by-side to see an example of what you describe.
czcams.com/video/-r8rfgNg_Lo/video.html