How to Make a Bar Chart in Excel

A bar chart in Excel shows one horizontal bar per category, so readers can compare sizes at a glance. To make one, select your labels and numbers, go to Insert > Insert Column or Bar Chart and choose Clustered Bar. This guide walks through the steps, then shows how to sort the bars, add labels, build stacked bars and fix the problems that make bar charts look wrong.

Bar chart or column chart?#

Excel uses two names for the same idea. A bar chart has horizontal bars; a column chart has vertical ones. Both compare values across categories, such as sales by product or headcount by team.

Choose a bar chart when:

• The labels are long, like "Desk lamps" or full department names. Horizontal bars leave room to read them without tilting the text.
• There are many categories, roughly eight or more. A list of bars reads like a ranked table.
• You want to show a ranking, largest at the top.

Choose a column chart for a few short labels, and a line chart for change over time. The overview of chart types in Excel compares them all, and the guide to making a pie chart covers parts of one whole.

How to make a bar chart in Excel#

All the steps use this summary of sales by product in A1:B6:

1. Select A1:B6, including the headers. Don't include a total row.
2. Go to the Insert tab.
3. In the Charts group, click Insert Column or Bar Chart.
4. Under 2-D Bar, choose Clustered Bar.

Excel inserts a chart with one bar per product. The header "Sales" becomes the chart title. Drag the chart to move it, and drag a corner to resize it.

On Windows, Alt+F1 inserts the default chart next to the data, but the default is a column chart. Click Chart Design > Change Chart Type > Bar to switch it. On a Mac, use the Insert tab as above. If you are not sure which chart fits, Insert > Recommended Charts shows previews based on your data.

Sort the bars so the biggest is at the top#

Excel plots the first row of data at the bottom of a bar chart, which surprises most people. With the table above, Notebooks is at the bottom and Folders at the top, in no useful order.

To put the biggest bar on top, sort the data from smallest to largest:

1. Click any cell in the Sales column (B2:B6).
2. Go to Home > Sort & Filter > Sort Smallest to Largest, or click the A to Z sort button on the Data tab.

The chart updates at once: Folders (1,750) is now at the bottom and Backpacks (6,300) at the top. The bars read like a ranking from the top down.

If you can't sort the data, flip the chart instead. Right-click the vertical axis (Mac: Control-click), choose Format Axis, and tick Categories in reverse order. Then set Horizontal axis crosses to At maximum category so the value axis moves back to the bottom.

Add a title, data labels and axis formatting#

A good bar chart can be read without looking at the table. Click the chart, then the + button beside it (Windows), or use Chart Design > Add Chart Element on both Windows and Mac:

• Chart Title: click the title and type something specific, like "Sales by product, Q1".
• Data Labels: put the value at the end of each bar. With labels, you can often delete the value axis and the gridlines for a cleaner look.
• Gap width: right-click a bar, choose Format Data Series and lower Gap Width to make the bars thicker.
• Number format: for large numbers, format the source cells, for example to show thousands with a K; see rounding and showing numbers in thousands.

Use one colour for all bars unless a colour means something, such as highlighting your own team.

Clustered and stacked bar charts#

When each category has two or more numbers, choose how to compare them. Here is the same summary with two years:

• Clustered Bar puts the 2025 and 2026 bars side by side for each product. Use it to compare years within a product: Backpacks grew, Pens fell.
• Stacked Bar joins the parts end to end, so each bar's length is the total. Use it when the parts add up to something meaningful, such as sales by region within each product.
• 100% Stacked Bar makes every bar the same length and shows each part as a share. Use it to compare mixes, not sizes.

If the years come out as categories and the products as colours, click Chart Design > Switch Row/Column.

Build the chart from a summary table#

Charts work best from a short summary, not from hundreds of raw rows. If your data is a list of orders, total it by product first, then chart the totals. With products in A2:A9 and sales in C2:C9:

=SUMIF($A$2:$A$9,E2,$C$2:$C$9)

With Backpacks in E2, this returns the Backpacks total, and filling it down gives one total per product. The guides to summing by category and summarising data without a PivotTable show the full method. Because the chart points at the formula cells, it updates when new orders arrive.

To check a total before you chart it, select the cells and read the Sum on the status bar at the bottom of the window; see the status bar sum. A PivotTable works too: click inside it and choose PivotTable Analyze > PivotChart > Bar.

Common bar chart problems#

Most bar chart problems come from the selected data, not the chart settings:

To change which cells the chart uses, right-click it, choose Select Data, and adjust the ranges.

Practise it#

Try the exercise on this page: it totals one product's sales, the first step before any bar chart. Then practise pivot-style summaries in a live spreadsheet, where you build a table of totals and counts by category with formulas and each answer is checked instantly. That summary is exactly the data a clean bar chart needs.