Most reports and presentations contain a lot of boring charts that describe the state before and after some event, action, etc. However, using simple visual tricks, you can shake up the audience and draw attention to the essence of your presentation.

The creation of a large number of visually consistent charts to represent different data is a time consuming and error prone task unless you know how to copy formatting between charts.

Every workbook uses a palette of 56 colors, but you can change the palette for the current workbook or even change the default colors for new workbooks.

You can unlink a chart from its data ranges and produce a static chart that remains unaffected by later changes in the data.

A Gantt chart is a horizontal bar chart often used in project management applications like Microsoft Project. In the Gantt chart, the horizontal axis represents the total time span of the project, and each bar represents a project task: the left edge indicates the beginning moment of the activity, and the right edge indicates the estimated ending moment. The viewer can quickly see the duration of each task and identify overlapping tasks.

Excel easily incorporates a pattern, texture, or graphic file for elements of your chart (see more about filling options in Microsoft). E.g., you can create a funny burger sales chart for your colleagues or a collected revenue chart:

For certain chart types, you can add error bars to your chart. Error bars often are used to indicate "plus or minus" information that reflects uncertainty in the data.