Ges Rental Tripod1G >> Creating charts and pictographs

Creating charts and pictographs

Using the Chart tool, you can create charts to visually display numeric data. You create a chart by entering data and choosing display options. You can later edit the data and change the display options to update the chart.

A FreeHand chart is a grouped series of objects that acts much like any other group--you can enlarge, scale, rotate, and move it, and you can also edit individual chart elements. Once you ungroup a chart, however, it becomes a graphic and you can no longer edit the data, even if you regroup the chart.

Pictographs are graphics that replace the standard chart bars or lines with an image. For example, you can represent a monetary value with a stack of coins or a library value with stack of books.

Charts are created in grayscale. You can color them using various techniques.

To create a chart:

1	In the Tools panel, select the Chart tool from its pop-up menu.
2	Drag the pointer to set the initial size of the chart.
	The Chart dialog box appears with the insertion point in the data entry text box. The active cell is outlined in black.
	To change the active cell, click a different cell or use the arrow keys.
3	Do one of the following to add data to the selected cell:
	Type in the text box above the chart cells. To undo the last change, click the Undo button.
	Click Import to import tab-delimited text from another application, such as Microsoft Excel.
4	To create labels and legends, leave the top left cell empty. Enter data across the first row for the chart legend and in the left column for the labels.
	Labels appear across the bottom of the graph and the legend appears at its right side. Type quotation marks around number labels to have them read as numbers instead of data.
5	To transpose the rows and columns and their data, click the Transpose button.
6	To adjust column width, drag the triangle above the line separating two columns.
7	To set the data precision, enter a Decimal Precision value for the number of decimal places to which the data will be rounded. Select Thousands Separator to punctuate values of one thousand or greater.
8	Continue entering data as needed, repeating steps 3 through 7.
	Note: The Chart tool plots empty cells as values of 0.
9	When you have finished entering data, click Apply to create the chart, or click OK to create the chart and close the dialog box.
10	Click the style button at the top of the dialog box to specify the chart type. For more information, see Setting the chart type and options.

To edit data in a chart:

1	Select the chart in your document.
2	In the Tools panel, if the Chart tool is not showing, select it from its pop-up menu.
3	Double-click the Chart tool.
4	In the Chart dialog box, select a cell or drag to select multiple cells.
5	To edit data in the worksheet, select any of the following options:
	Cut removes data from highlighted cells.
	Copy copies data from highlighted cells.
	Paste pastes copied or cut data into cells starting with the cell currently highlighted.
6	To switch the data categories and groupings:
	Click Transpose to change the columns to rows and the rows to columns.
	If you’re creating a scatter chart, click Switch XY to reverse the x axis and y axis.
7	When you have finished editing data, click Apply to preview your changes without closing the Chart dialog box, or click OK to apply the changes and close the dialog box.

To edit the appearance of chart elements:

1	In the Tools panel, click the Subselect tool.
2	Click a chart element to select it.
3	Select Edit > Select > Superselect or press the Tilde (~) key to select all of the elements in that series.
4	Edit the selection as desired. You can apply most of the same changes and transformations to the selected elements as you can to any other FreeHand object, such as coloring, scaling, or rotating.
	You can add perspective to the entire chart, but not to individual elements. For more information, see Creating perspective.

To color selected chart elements:

Select a stroke or fill color from the pop-up color boxes in the Tools panel. You can also use Find and Replace Graphics feature to change colors in a chart; for more information, see Making global changes.