Making a Bar Chart in MS Excel
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These directions are for making a bar chart that corresponds to a contingency table analysis, like the analysis of the crayfish data at the beginning of Chapter 4 of the Online Stats Manual. Nonetheless, these same tools described below should help you get started with other types of bar graphs.
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First, make sure your data are entered like in the highlighted cells (A1 through C3) of the spreadsheet in the screenshot below. (For other types of bar charts, your data may look different.)
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After clicking and dragging around your cells to highlight them, click the Insert tab, then Column, then the upperleft column chart (the one circled in red in the screenshot).
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You should now see a graph that looks like this:
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You now need to switch your Rows and Columns in your graph to make dark and light (the independent variable in this example) appear along the x-axis. To do this, right click within your chart, then click Select Data. You should see a window that looks like this:
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Click on any of your variables (dark is selected in the screenshot above), then click the Switch Row/Column button. You should now see a graph that looks like this:
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At this point, all that's left to do is label your axes and make sure your formatting is clear. You may find these directions helpful for that.
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When done, your graph should look something like this:
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