Grouping information in a chart

[DavidG]

What I'm trying to do is probably fairly simple, but I don't know much
about making charts with Excel, and I couldn't find anything in the
help files for this.

I have a large amount of data that I need put into a chart. Each entry
is grouped into a category. What I need to do is have Excel make a
chart that shows the total revenue for each category. From my
attempts, I can only make a chart that has the correct axis values, but
each individual entry comes up within the group (so, instead of one big
bar for a category, there are several smaller ones next to each other
that don't merge). I also need the category titles to be in
alphabetical order along the X-axis.

Any help people can give me will be greatly appreciated!

 

[Dav]

you need to summarise your data first

If you know your categories type them in a list
apples
bananas
oranges
pears

If the above list in in cells a1:a4, and your categories are in c1:c100
and the vlaues in d1:d1000 in cell b1 type
(sumif($c$1:$c$1000,a1,$d$1:$d$1000)

and then copy it down to the 3 cells below, use this range to plot the
graph

Else if you do not know the categories use a pivot table and then plot
the graph from a pivot table. Data_pivot table report

Regards

Dav

 

[DavidG]

Pivotchart is exactly what I needed, thanks!