This project is about presenting numeric data a bit more clearly. There will be some people out there who simply love sheets of figures and can quite easily make sense of them in that form – this is not meant for them. It is for all the others who would like to turn them into graphs or charts which many find a lot easier to understand.

It is very much still being developed, and new material and links will be added as I get them ready or contributions come in, so please check back again if you can't find what you need now. There is also a mini 'Charts' site which provides a brief overview of each part of the project where latest news will be published.

Here's a set of figures which represent how respondents to a survey felt about their progress in meeting some ILT standards in 2004.

As well as not being particularly well set out and containing some superfluous data, it really doesn't get much of a message across. Now let's try a chart.

Distribution of level 1 responses to standards A B and C.

Now this doesn't include all the data. It just shows the distribution of people who said that they were just starting to meet the standards but it does that quite clearly – you can see that the A group is the main area of concern, with A3, A2 and C3 being those that might warrant some more examination.

You would need four similar charts to complete the picture but the picture they would paint would be much more likely to be a clear one.

You might have wished to show the distribution of responses at levels 1 to 5 for just standard A1. This would look like this:

Standard A1: Distribution of responses at levels 1 to 5

Again, it's pretty clear that most people are at level 2 or 3, and use of colour to show the area of concern as red and the advanced group green helps too.

A series of little charts might then be satisfactory for many purposes. Let's try:

A1: comparison of confidence levels 1 to 5

A2: comparison of confidence levels 1 to 5

A3: comparison of confidence levels 1 to 5

Or, all three could be combined in one, like this, which is probably the best idea, especially as for the data above, you would have needed nine separate charts which might have been a bit much.

Overall confidence levels from 1 to 5 for standard A

Or even use some pictures and have them stacked up in proportion to the responses, like this.

Both the above make it very clear that not many respondents said they felt they were very far advanced (the level 5 response) in any of the A standards at the time. (You could probably have gathered this from the data table but perhaps not as immediately.)

So far, a range of techniques have been used, some fairly simple and others which are buried quite deep in Excel's menus. In this project we shall try to take you through how to select just the bits of data to include in a graph, how to select which type of chart or graph to use and how to change the default display in Excel. We'll use the examples shown above but hopefully you'll then be able to apply the techniques to the data you wish to display.