A reader emailed to ask whether you could make a dynamic chart using OFFSET-function-based Names in Excel 2016 for Mac. Good question, and I wondered if he’d encountered some unexpected problem, perhaps a bug, in Mac Excel. So I dusted off my MacBook Pro and tried it out. Bottom line: There are several ways to make dynamic charts in Excel, and there seems to be no difference other than cosmetic in how they work between different versions of Excel, and between operating system. The protocols are the same for Mac Excel and Windows Excel, and perhaps it’s time for a quick review. This exercise was done completely in Mac Excel 2016, and other than not knowing a few of the shortcuts I use everyday, it was not very different from working in Windows Excel 2016. Dynamic Charts in Excel It’s pretty easy to set up data and create a chart in Excel.
When you first install Excel 2016, the add-in programs included with Excel are not loaded and therefore are not yet ready to use. To load any or all of these add-in programs, you follow these steps: Click the File menu button, click Excel Options or press Alt+FT to open the Excel Options dialog box, and then click the Add-Ins tab. Excel for Office 365 Excel for Office 365 for Mac Excel 2019 Excel 2016 Excel 2019 for Mac Word Box and whisker charts are most commonly used in statistical analysis. For example, you could In Excel, click Insert > Insert Statistic Chart >Box and Whisker as shown in the following illustration.
But once you’ve created a chart, it keeps plotting data from the same cells. If the data in the cells changes, so does the chart, but if the data extends to more cells (or shrinks to fewer cells), the chart doesn’t seem to notice. There are a couple ways to create charts that will grow with your data.
The easiest way is to use Tables as the chart source data. A bit more complicated is to use Excel’s Names to define the series data for your chart. Using Names can lead to more flexibility in defining the data in your charts. I’ll describe how to make dynamic charts using Tables, using Names, and using Names in a more flexible way. Dynamic Charts Using Tables The easiest way to make a chart’s contents reflect the size of a range of data is to put the data into a Table.
Tables made their appearance in Excel 2003, and were called “Lists”. These lists were a more structured container for your data, with a database structure of fields (columns) and records (rows), field headers (column headers) and filtering tools. You could sort and filter your data range easily, and any formula that used a whole column of your List updated to automatically keep using that whole column of the list. Lists became the favored source data for charts and also for pivot tables. In Excel 2007, Lists became known as “Tables”, and their capabilities have been expanded in every version since. The screenshot below shows the same data and chart as above, but the data is now in a Table. To get your data into a table, you select it (or select one cell and let Excel figure out how far it stretches), and on the Insert tab of the ribbon, click Table.
Excel asks if your table has headers, then it applies a Table style (the yellow style is shown below), it adds AutoFilter dropdown arrows to the field headers, and it puts a small backwards “L” bracket at the bottom right corner of the table. You can change the size of the Table by clicking and dragging the bracket at the bottom left corner of the Table. If you type or paste data directly below the Table, the Table will automatically expand to include this new data. And a chart that uses all rows of the existing Table will expand accordingly. If you type or paste data directly to the right of the Table, the Table will also automatically expand to include this new data. A chart that uses all of the existing Table will expand accordingly.
This little trick of adding a new series if the data expands accordingly is nice, but it requires that the chart already contain all of the Table’s data. Names (a/k/a “Defined Names”, “Named Ranges”, etc.) A Name is what Excel calls a variable that resides in a worksheet or a workbook. Names are often assigned to cells or ranges; for example, you might place a sales tax rate into a cell and name the cell SalesTax, and subsequently use the cell’s name rather than its address in a formula. Because of this Names have been nicknamed “Named Ranges”. However, the definition of the name includes a formula. If my sales tax rate was stored in cell A1, then my Name SalesTax would have a definition of “=A1”. Because of this, John Walkenbach, but he’s smarter than the rest of us, so his suggestion didn’t stick. We can use Names in our charts, but we need a distinct name for each dynamic range that the chart will need.