I often refer to my method of creating graphs as "brute force Excel," meaning that you can make almost anything work in Excel, but it sometimes means getting a little creative. The method described in this post can be considered a prime example of brute force Excel, where I walk through the steps for turning tabular data into a value plotted visually within a range.

See my makeovers for Naomi Robbins' Forbes blog 2012 makeover challenge. This post features two remakes, the first a pair of donuts and the second a big table of data. 

This post features a couple remakes of a graph shown in the Wall Street Journal summarizing a recent Forrester report that concluded Microsoft is late to the market expansion into mobile and has lost its dominant position.

I have a penchant for horizontal bar graphs. Check out this post for discussion on why and a remake illustrating the use case for horizontal bar graphs.

In this post, I outline the shortcomings of these colorful donuts and look at another way to visualize this data.

Word clouds created a bit of buzz when they first became popular. However, I often find that upon further evaluation they tend to be a letdown—full of fluff without so much informative value. Check out this post for my discussion on why and a word cloud makeover.

While it's easy to put your data into a chart and feel like you're done, this is a disservice to both your mission and your data. Here, I focus on an example from a recent workshop and discuss teasing the story out of the data, using data labels to help draw our audience's attention to where we want it.