Excel is a powerful tool that you can use to create graphs and charts for small or large amounts of data. In this Excel tutorial, I'll show you how to take a small data set and turn it into a simple bar chart, along with the options you have to customize the chart. Once you've mastered the basics, you can use the same techniques for larger data sets.

First, I created a set of student test data for our example. There are eight students with their test scores on four exams. To graph this, you will first want to select the entire range of data, including the titles (Test 1, etc.).

Now that your data is selected as shown above, click on the Insert tab on the ribbon interface. Slightly to the right you will see the Charts section as shown below.

By default, it tries to list the most common types of charts, such as column, line, pie, bar, area, and scatter. If you want a different type of chart, just click on Other Charts. For our example, we will try to use a column chart to visualize the data. Click on Column and then select the type of chart you want. There are a lot of options! Don't worry, because if you choose a chart that you don't like, you can easily switch to another chart type with just a click of your mouse.