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.

If you often need to adjust your data ranges so that your charts plot an updated data range, you may be interested in a trick that forces Excel to update the chart's data range whenever you add new data to your worksheet.

This chart resembles a speedometer gauge and displays a value between 0 and 100%.

A Gantt chart is a horizontal bar chart that is often used in project management applications like Microsoft Project.

Excel makes it easy to incorporate a pattern, texture, or graphic file for elements in your chart. E.g., you can create a funny burger sales chart for your colleagues.

When you're plotting data over time, you may want to plot a trend line that describes the data. A trend line points out general trends in your data.

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.