Excel Chart Speed Tips

Author: David H. Ringstrom

In this course author and Excel expert David Ringstrom, CPA, shares lots of tricks and techniques you can implement to create, streamline, and even automate Excel charts. You'll see how to build self-expanding charts that automatically display new data, along with self-updating chart titles. David will show how to create a rolling chart to display results such as trailing twelve-sales. You'll also learn how to create and use customized chart templates, build a Waterfall Chart to illustrate a financial statement, and troubleshoot frustrating chart issues.

David H. Ringstrom, CPA, has more than 30 years of experience as a spreadsheet and accounting software consultant and speaker. He has presented over 2,500 live webinars and is the author or co-author of ten books, including “Microsoft 365 Excel All-in-One for Dummies”, “Microsoft 365 Excel for Dummies”, “Exploring Microsoft Excel’s Hidden Treasures”, and “QuickBooks Online for Dummies”.

In his courses, David demonstrates every technique twice: first on a PowerPoint slide with numbered steps and then live in Excel for Microsoft 365 for Windows. He highlights any differences in Excel 2024, 2021, or 2019 during the course and in his detailed handouts. Attendees also receive an Excel workbook containing most of the examples he uses, making it easy to follow along and apply the techniques later. David additionally supports Excel for Mac users by answering their follow-up questions via email.

Publication Date: February 2026

Designed For
Professionals seeking to utilize Excel's charting features more effectively.

Topics Covered

• Linking chart titles to worksheet cells as a step toward a self-updating chart title
• Managing the pivot chart buttons that control filtering and other aspects of pivot charts
• Preventing chart resize issues by using Excel tables
• Filtering data within PivotTables by way of the Slicer feature
• Duplicating the formatting of one chart into a second chart
• Creating pivot charts from lists of data in Excel
• Streamlining the process of resizing charts after you manually add data
• Illustrating financial statements with the Waterfall chart feature
• Creating line, column, and win/loss sparklines to show data trends
• Most features and functions work in Excel for Mac as well but expect differences
• Using the Recommended Charts feature to create suitable charts from data with a couple of mouse clicks
• Preventing chart gaps by changing the horizontal axis to a Text Axis

Learning Objectives

• Identify the chart type that is particularly suited to presenting financial statements in chart form
• Demonstrate how to access the Save As Template command that creates chart templates
• Identify and apply the appropriate axis type in an Excel chart to control the display of date-based data, ensuring that missing dates (such as weekends) do not create unintended gaps
• Identify the keyboard shortcut that creates a chart object on an Excel worksheet
• Identify the character you can you use in lieu of the CONCAT and CONCATENATE worksheet functions for combining portions of text together

Level
Basic

Instructional Method
Self-Study

NASBA Field of Study
Computer Software & Applications (2 hours)

Program Prerequisites
None

Advance Preparation
None