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Excel – Graphs and Charts

Excel – Graphs and Charts

This quick reference guide explains how to insert, edit, and format graphs and charts in Excel, with a
focus on the charts you use most often in roles such as investment banking and private equity.

As with the other quick reference guides, this one is a summary – so, we do not list every single step-
by-step point covered in the video-based lessons.

Table of Contents

EXCEL – GRAPHS AND CHARTS 1

How to Create and Format Basic Charts 2

Line, Column, and Pie Charts 2
Combination Charts 5
Formatting Charts and Graphs 7

Specialized Charts for Investment Bank and Financial Modeling 9

Valuation Multiple Graphs 10
Football Field Charts with Dynamic Share-Price Lines 12
Price-Volume Graphs 23
Waterfall Bridge Charts 28

Dynamic Charts for Excel Dashboards 35

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How to Create and Format Basic Charts

Inserting basic charts is fairly simple:

1) Ideally, select the data you want to use first. Then, go to the Insert tab in the ribbon menu and
select something from the “Charts” section; “Recommended Charts” is often a good first step.

2) Then, format the chart the way you want, which includes changing font colors and sizes, adding
axes, legends, and graph titles, and adding items such as data labels and axis titles for clarity.
You can access these formatting options with Ctrl + 1 or ⌘ + 1, or click the chart and go to the
menu on the right side.

3) If you cannot select the data before inserting the chart because the data is not contiguous, you
can also insert a blank chart, right-click it and go to “Select Data,” and then link to the data
series you want to use, separated by commas.

Line, Column, and Pie Charts

If you want to create a simple column chart for something like annual revenue:

1) Link in the data with direct links or functions like TRANSPOSE so that the dates and financial
figures are contiguous.

2) Then, select the dates and financial figures and go to Insert → Recommended Charts:

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3) Then, select the chart type you want to use. If you don’t see it on the “Recommended Charts”
tab, go to “All Charts” and find the one you want there:

4) And then insert the chart:

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This chart has some formatting issues with the dates, the font color and size, and the lack of data
labels, but it’s not terrible.

If you want to graph non-contiguous data, such as revenue by segment, then you may have to insert
the chart first and then select the data:

For the Horizontal Axis Labels here, you can click “Edit” and then select the range of dates:

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And then, you can select the series names from the text labels for each segment of revenue.

Again, this formatting isn’t spectacular, but it’s OK for a quick graph.

Any “standard” chart – clustered or stacked columns, line charts, bar charts, and pie charts – follows
this same basic process.

Return to Top.

Combination Charts

In modern versions of Excel, combination charts, such as combined line and column charts, are simple
because they are built-in chart types.

For example, to create a combo chart for Walmart’s revenue, EBITDA, and EBITDA margin, with
columns for the first two and a line for the third, you can select all the data, go to Insert →
Recommended Charts, and Excel figures it out for you:

You can also select the “Combo” chart type from the Insert tab in the ribbon menu if you know the
exact type you want to use:

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If you are using a much older version of Excel, combination charts are not built-in, so you will have to
insert a standard chart type, like Stacked Column, and then you’ll have to right-click a series on it and
go to Change Series Chart Type:

You may also have to change the Primary or Secondary Axis option for these series so that you can see
the series whose Chart Type you want to change.

Return to Top.

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Formatting Charts and Graphs

Modern versions of Excel do a decent job of automatically formatting graphs as you insert and create
them, but they don’t do everything perfectly.

You can access most of the formatting options under the “Design” tab in the ribbon menu, or Alt, JC in
modern PC versions; in much older versions, formatting options are in the “Layout” tab.

We use the following standards when formatting graphs:

1) Font Colors and Backgrounds – Stick to black fonts on white backgrounds unless you need to
match the color scheme of a client.

2) Titles – Add Chart Titles and Axis Titles, and make them dynamic by linking to cells in the Excel
file for both. You can skip titles for simple/obvious axes, such as “Years” at the bottom of a
column or line chart.

3) Colors – Use the default color schemes, such as shades of red and blue, and avoid “rainbow
unicorn graphs.” High-contrast colors may be acceptable in graphs with many different series –
but you should also ask yourself if the graph should have that many series.

4) Gridlines – It’s fine to keep light grey gridlines in the background of graphs, but you may want
to remove them when you paste the graphs into PowerPoint or Word.

5) Legends – Include a Legend if there are between 2 and 5 data series on the graph. Once you go
beyond ~5 series, the Legend will be too crowded to read.

6) Data Labels – These are usually helpful, especially for simple graphs with only 1-2 data series.
Beyond that, they make graphs too crowded. You can sometimes improve legibility by reducing
the “Gap Width” of the series to ~95% so that the entire label fits within the bar.

7) Custom Number Formats – These are useful for changing large numbers into smaller ones so
that they use fewer decimal places and take up less space. For example:

Custom Number Format: What It Does:

$0, Divides a number by 1,000 without listing "B" or "m"
or any other text after the number.
$0,, Same, but divides by 1,000,000 instead. Each comma
represents 1,000, so “,,” means 1,000 * 1,000.

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$0, \B Divides a number by 1,000 and lists a space followed

by a "B" after.
$0, \K Same, but with “K” at the end.
$0,, "mm" Divides a number by 1,000,000 and adds "mm" at the
end.

A well-formatted graph might look like the following:

Note the following points in this graph:

1) Size 12 Font Everywhere – We changed the default font size to improve legibility.

2) Legend at the Bottom – Since there are only 2 data series, a Legend makes sense.

3) Custom Number Formats for the Axes and Data Labels – We don’t want to display numbers
like $40,000,000 on the left-hand side; $40 M is far more readable.

4) Only 1 Set of Data Labels – The red line and the blue columns overlap for about half this graph,
so data labels for the red line would have been too difficult to read.

5) Titles for Primary and Secondary Vertical Axes but Not Horizontal Axis – It’s obvious what the
horizontal axis represents, so there’s no need for an axis title.

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Another example of a well-formatted graph is this one for Walmart’s total retail square feet and sales
per square foot:

We follow the same standards as in the graph above, but there are a few small differences:

1) Black Borders – To do this, right-click each axis, go to “Format Axis,” go to the paint bucket
icon, and change the Line style to “Solid Line” with a black color and a width of 0.75 pt. These
solid black borders make the axes a bit easier to read.

2) Dynamic Title – It’s a direct link to another cell in the spreadsheet so that if something ever
changes, the title updates automatically.

Return to Top.

Specialized Charts for Investment Bank and Financial Modeling

You could create and use bar, line, column, and pie charts in almost any industry.

But there are other charts that you will use only in financial models, valuations, or other financial
analyses.

Creating these charts usually involves a “trick” that the built-in graphs and charts do not offer, or some
method of manipulating data into a different format before graphing it.

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Valuation Multiple Graphs

Often, you want to show the results of a valuation visually rather than displaying pages of numbers in
Excel.

For example, with a set of comparable public companies, the “Excel version” looks like this:

That’s “OK,” but it takes some time and effort to read and interpret this data. By contrast, if you make
it visual, it takes approximately 2 seconds to interpret:

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These graphs are easier to interpret because you can instantly tell how Walmart compares to the
other companies in terms of growth rates and multiples.

The “trick” is that you need to graph 2 data series on each chart – one for all the companies, including
Walmart, and one that has “blanks” for all the companies and only a single entry for Walmart.

Then, you color-code each series differently so that Walmart appears in red, and all the other
companies appear in blue.

You start this process by retrieving the required data from the Public Comps’ page (either the “data”
one or the “output” one), ideally using INDEX and MATCH functions:

Once you have the figures for the revenue, EBITDA, multiples, and anything else you want to show, you
then create “Helper” columns next to the figures for each metric:

So, if the current ticker does NOT match the ticker of the company we’re valuing, we display “#N/A”
using the NA() function, which ensures that nothing will show up in the graph. If there is a match, then
we display the subject company’s figure.

Then, you create a Clustered Column Chart that uses both these series:

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Next, right-click the red bar, go to “Format Data Series,” and change the Series Overlap to 100%:

You can then format this graph by changing the font color, font size, axes, data labels, custom number
formats, and more.

Return to Top.

Football Field Charts with Dynamic Share-Price Lines

The “football field” chart serves a purpose similar to that of valuation multiple graphs: it lets you
quickly get a sense of a company’s valuation rather than staring at a screen of numbers.

Here’s what the finished version looks like for Walmart:

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You can find templates for these graphs online, but most suffer from a few key problems:

1) Vertical Bars – Graphs with vertical bars are easier to set up, but banks tend to use horizontal
bars with a vertical line for the company’s current share price.

2) Percentile Ranges – Most templates don’t support percentile ranges, such as the min to 25th
percentile, the 25th percentile to median, and so on; they use a single color for each bar.

3) Dynamic Share-Price Lines – Most templates do not support these, so you need to add the
company’s share price to the graph manually and remember to update it.

Our template fixes all these issues, but it does take a few more steps to set up:

Step 1.1: First, assemble the output of each valuation methodology across all the percentiles, which
you can do with the TRANSPOSE function and a basic Equity Value → Enterprise Value bridge:

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Then, you need to display these in reverse order for the graph, which you can do with direct links or
with an INDEX/MATCH combination to reverse the order.

We normally do this on a separate “ValGraph” sheet.

Step 1.2: Next, calculate the “distance” between each point, starting with the 25th Percentile Values
minus the Minimum Values; these distances will be the segments in the chart:

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Step 1.3: Then, select the data on the right (from “Min Point” to “Max Point”) and go to the Insert tab
and then “Stacked Bar Chart”:

Step 1.4: Right-click this new graph, go to Select Data and then Edit Horizontal Axis Labels, and link to
the labels for the methodologies on the left-hand side:

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The graph will now look like this:

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To get an extra space at the top of the graph, you can manually extend the data range to row 51 rather
than row 50:

Step 1.5: Now, you can format the graph, add labels, change the colors and fonts, add axis titles, and
hide the bars you don’t want to see. For example, you often show only the 25th percentile to 75th
percentile and hide the rest:

Here’s the graph after changing the fonts, borders, and legend, and adding labels for each set of
methodologies:

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Part 2 of this process involves adding the company’s Current Share Price as a vertical line, which is
much harder than it sounds:

Step 2.1: Create a “dummy series” for the Current Share Price under the main data area, and link to
the Current Share Price in the Min to Max columns and then a dummy number, such as 1,000, followed
by 0’s:

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Step 2.2: Right-click the graph, go to Select Data, and then go to “Add” under Legend Entries (Series)
and use “Current Share Price” for the Series Name and the dummy series for the Series Values:

Step 2.3: Now, left-click this new bar on the graph and manually change the Series Formula in the
formula bar so that it has both X and Y values. This is the trick:

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The new formula should look like this:

=SERIES(ValGraph!$B$52, ValGraph!$I$52:$M$52, ValGraph!$N$52:$R$52,1)

Once you make this change, your graph will look completely wrong – temporarily:

Step 2.4: Right-click the Current Share Price bar in the graph, go to Change Series Chart Type, and
select “Scatter with Smooth Lines and Markers.” The Secondary Axis box will be checked automatically:

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You’ll now see a vertical line at the position of the company’s Current Share Price in the graph.

Step 2.5: Right-click the graph, go to Select Data, and for the first “blank” series, change the Horizontal
Axis Labels to the names on the left-hand side, and click OK:

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Step 2.6: Right-click the Secondary Vertical Axis, go to Format Axis, and change the Min to 0 and Max
to 1,000:

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You can also remove the labels for this Secondary Vertical Axis.

Step 2.7: Now, you can change the color and any other formatting for the Share Price line:

In real life, you don’t have to complete this series of steps to create and format football field charts:
you take a template from an existing file and modify the graph as necessary.

We presented this set of steps to illustrate some of the problems that come up when you create
complex graph types that are not built into Excel.

Return to Top.

Price-Volume Graphs

You use the price-volume graph to assess how a company’s stock price has traded over the past year –
or the past 3 years, 5 years, or some other period. The graph looks like this:

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This trading history is significant because if, for example, significant trading volume occurred at a much
lower price, then bankers could argue that shareholders might accept a lower offer price if the
company wants to sell.

This graph also lets potential acquirers assess potential acquisition targets and the prices they might be
willing to accept.

Finally, this graph also helps companies determine whether it’s better to raise equity or debt; equity
tends to be better when the company’s share price and valuation multiples are relatively high
compared with their historical levels (so that there’s less dilution).

To create and format the graph, follow these steps:

Step 1: Gather the Data

Go to Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, Bloomberg, Capital IQ, or any other service and retrieve the
company’s share price history and volume of shares traded over the period you want to use.

Then, paste it into Excel and make sure the earliest date is at the top:

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Step 2: Create the Chart

Select the dates, the share prices, and the trading volumes, and insert a Clustered Column Chart:

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Then, right-click the Volume series (the red columns), go to Change Series Chart Type, and make the
Share Price graph a Line, with the Volume on a Secondary Vertical Axis:

Step 3: Fix Annoying Problems

This graph is difficult to read because of all the gaps between the red bars. To fix that, right-click the
Volume series, go to Format Data Series, and change the Gap Width to 0%:

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And then right-click the horizontal axis, go to Format Axis, and change the Axis Type to Text Axis:

Then, you can fix the dates on the axis by going to Format Axis and changing the interval for Tick Marks
and Labels to 25:

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Finally, if you want to ensure that the last date in the series appears as the final date on the horizontal
axis on the graph, you can use this “hack”:

This method is very messy, and if you do it, you should leave a comment somewhere so that other
people know why the same date is repeated.

Step 4: Apply Additional Formatting

Finally, you can now change the font colors, font sizes, chart title, legend, and anything else you want,
including the custom number formats for the axes.

Go to the “finished” screenshot at the top of this section if you want to see a well-formatted graph.

Return to Top.

Waterfall Bridge Charts

Waterfall charts let you see the change in revenue, profits, and other metrics from one period to the
next – and what contributes to those changes.

For example, if the company’s revenue grows from $9 million to $11 million, $1 million might come
from new subscribers, $300K might come from price increases, and $700K might come from acquired
companies.

A waterfall chart provides a visual for these contributions and makes it easy to see why the company’s
revenue is growing or declining. Here’s an example:

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If you are using Office 365 or desktop Excel 2016 or later, waterfall charts are easy to create because
they are built into Excel.

In older versions, they take time and effort to create because you need to insert the graphs manually
and calculate many additional “helper” columns.

Here’s the “easy version” in Office 365 or desktop Excel 2016 or later:

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And then you right-click the bars that should represent totals and click “Set as Total”:

You can then format this graph with the usual changes to colors, fonts, borders, titles, the legend, and
so on, since the default version doesn’t look great:

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If you are not using a modern version of Excel, here are the set of steps to follow:

Step 1: Create a “Values” column that lists all the individual contributions and sub-totals. This part has
nothing to do with Excel graphing – you calculate it based on company data. You can see an example in
the second screenshot in this section.

Step 2: Create an "Ends" column for the sub-totals, i.e., the annual Revenue, EBITDA, or other figures:

Step 3: Create an "Up" column for all the positive segment contributions: =MAX(0, Value).

Step 4: Create a "Down" column for all the negative segment contributions: =-MIN(0, Value):

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Step 5: Create a "Blank" column for the "bottoms" of the visible bars. In each section, the first “Blank”
will be Value in Previous Row – Down in Current Row.

Then, after the first “Blank,” if the Previous Value was Negative, take the Previous Blank and subtract
the Down in this row. Otherwise, take the Previous Blank, add the previous Up, and subtract the Down
in this row.

This logic ensures that we move the bar’s starting position lower, if necessary, and that we move up if
the Value is positive, or down if it’s negative:

Step 6: Create a Stacked Column Chart based on the Labels, Ends, Blank, Up, and Down columns. You
will probably have to insert the chart first and then go to Select Data and input the series like that:

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Step 7: To set up the Data Labels for this graph, create a “Helper” column, which equals the “Ends” in
the subtotal rows and the Blank + Up + Down values for everything else:

Step 8: Now, add the Helper column as an additional series in the chart, go to Change Series Chart
Type, and make it a Line Chart:

Step 9: Add Data Labels to this new Line Chart, right-click them, go to Format Data Labels, check the
“Values from Cells” option, and select the Values column for the Data Label Range:

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This step will NOT work in old versions of Excel, such as 2007 and 2010. There, you’ll have to link each
Data Label manually, and there is no easier solution without using external add-ins or plugins.

Step 10: Make the line invisible and fix the formatting of the Data Labels:

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Step 11: Now, fix the formatting of everything else in the chart and add proper axes, titles, colors,
fonts, and so on.

As you can see, this process is complicated and error-prone, and you should avoid it in almost all cases.

Either use a modern version of Excel, or work from an existing template, such as the one included in
this course, and modify it if you need to add additional years or categories.

Return to Top.

Dynamic Charts for Excel Dashboards

Dynamic charts allow the user of the Excel file to modify graphs without editing anything in Excel or
changing the graph data sources.

For example, the user can check a checkbox or scroll a scrollbar, and the chart will change in response.

You can use these charts to create “dashboards” that summarize data and make it easy to see
historical and projected trends.

Here’s an example of a dynamic chart for Walmart’s financial performance:

The scrollbar moves over the set of years shown in the chart, and the checkboxes toggle the display of
the columns for EBITDA and the EBITDA margin.

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These charts are not difficult to set up, but you will need to enable the Developer Toolbar in Excel
(Options or Preferences → Customize Ribbon) and make sure you can insert Form Controls.

Once you’ve done that, here are the steps to create checkboxes to toggle data series on graphs:

Step 1: Make sure the Developer Toolbar is enabled within the Options menu under Customize Ribbon
(in Mac Excel, go to Preferences → View and then check “Developer tab” under “In Ribbon, Show”).

Step 2: Go to the Developer tab in the ribbon menu, Insert, and then go to Form Controls and insert a
checkbox from there:

Step 3: Once you insert the checkbox onto the graph, you can edit its text and other properties by
right-clicking it.

Step 4: Right-click the checkbox, go to Format Control, and then under the Control tab, add a link to
the cell in Excel that will reflect what you’ve checked or selected:

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Step 5: If you want, you could select the checkbox and then press the Alt key to snap it to the grid, and
you could group it with the graph to “attach” them.

Step 6: Now, go back to the data and change the formulas to reference the TRUE/FALSE cell and
display numbers or blanks depending on the value in that cell:

You can also use the NA() function instead of double quotes, as we do in the Revenue Growth column.

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Once you’re done, you may need to adjust the formatting on the graph, including the axis start and
end points, so that the graph looks correct when certain data series are added or removed.

Setting up scroll bars in graphs is a bit more complicated, but the basic process is the same.

Step 1: Again, make sure that the Developer Toolbar is enabled from within the Options or Preferences
menu.

Step 2: Again, go to the Developer tab in the ribbon menu, Insert, Form Controls, and add the scroll bar
element:

Step 3: You can right-click the scroll bar to edit its properties, such as its size and appearance.

Step 4: Right-click the scroll bar, go to Format Control, and then add a link to the cell in the
spreadsheet that will control the data series based on the position of the scroll bar.

Then, change each of the values here based on the data series you want to show and the number of
years (or other periods or units) you want to display in each screen:

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These names are not the most intuitive, so here’s an explanation of each option:

• Current Value: This one is the “current position” of the scroll bar within the scroll area. When
you scroll the scroll bar, the Current Value changes.

• Minimum Value: You normally set this to 1 to represent the first “position” of the graph.

• Maximum Value: This represents how many different “screens” will appear within the
scrollable area as you move to the right with the scroll bar. For example, if you have 10 years of
data, and you want to show 4 years of data on each screen, you should set the Maximum Value
to 10 – 4 + 1, or 7.

• Incremental Change: This one determines how much the current position changes when you
click the left or right scroll arrows. You normally set this to 1.

• Page Change: This control determines how much the current position changes when you click
directly in the scroll area, rather than the left or right arrows. Setting it to 2, as shown above,
means that the scroll area will advance 2 positions instead of 1 with each click.

• Cell Link: In the setup above, cell R31 displays the Current Value of the scroll bar in Excel. We
then use this number to change the data displayed in the graph.

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Excel – Graphs and Charts

Step 5: Now, you need to write an INDEX/MATCH function that will retrieve the data in this control cell
(R31) and display different data depending on its contents. For example:

This formula looks at cell R31 and then moves down the number of rows it represents; the P32 inside
the ROWS function is not anchored, so it moves down as we go from Year 1 to Year 4.

So, if this number in cell R31 is 1, we start in 2016 in the top area. If it’s 2, we start in 2017, and if it’s 3,
we start in 2018. And in all these cases, we move down 4 years and display everything.

Step 6: If the graph is currently linked to the larger set of data (for 2016 – 2025), right-click it, go to
Select Data, and change the data source to this smaller area with just the 4 years instead.

Step 7: Now, apply the normal formatting, including a dynamic chart title via a direct link to a
spreadsheet cell.

You can also add data labels, change the font colors and sizes, and so on.

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