 Right, so Excel can be a bit quick and dirty but, you know, at least effective, I suppose. So imagine you've got some data points here and you have an error bar. You could probably assemble a graph that looks like this in mere seconds, like insert, graph, add error bars, custom value, insert. It's barely a dozen button clicks to be honest. And maybe if you want to change it, there are various design options to fiddle around with it and play about with it, see what it looks like. But if you want to make it more interesting and more flexible, that can be a little bit of a challenge, especially with error bars, because you don't really get many options. You just get whether they're there or not, and a couple of the basic, like, line options with arrows and so on, and that's a little bit unpredictable and not great. So we're going to try something a little bit different. We're going to build something a bit more infographic-y. And here is kind of the end result that we're going to look at. So just some icons, some error bars, they're formatted a little bit differently and a little bit more flexibly. We could make these change size as we want, and I'll show you how to do this. The basics around it are that this is a stacked bar chart. So there are different series that actually come together to build this, and the idea of hacking stacked bar charts is actually quite extensible. You can do a lot of things with that. You can build things like this. You can build more interesting looking box and whisker charts. So maybe it's not the most stayed-in-professional looking chart, but it is that visually engaging infographic opinion, kind of visual. And noticeably, it's also dynamic. If you start changing any of these numbers, it should all update no problem. So let's go ahead and show how to do it. So I've got the data here. This is your data. If you're doing this as a report, that's your data table. This is how we're going to actually build it using these. So the first thing is bar I've called support. This is just an invisible bar at the very bottom of that stacked bar chart. So we need to figure out how far up the first error bar is. And well, that is basically your data minus your error. And then I'm going to put something in for the bar itself. I'm going to make that 0.2 for now. And the upper bar, I'm going to also make 0.2. And then I'm going to put a marker in the middle that's going to be a custom thing. You can do this. You don't have to do it this way. I'm just going to add it in for the sake of it. That's going to be one high. And I'm going to add in a label at the top, just as like an option if you wanted to put your icon there. I'm going to make that one high. That will also be set to transparent later. Now that remains how big are your error bars now? So we know what the error bars are size wise, but we've used part of the stacked bar chart to create a bar and a bit of a marker. So we're going to subtract that bar's size. We're also going to subtract the marker, but actually only half of it, about by two. So the same thing here. We're going to do the error bar minus the bar that we're going to stick on top minus half of that marker. So if we add all of these up from here to here, the sum tells me that it's 4.6. Well, that's twice the error bar. So what we expect great and I sum up to here says 4.75. That's 0.5 higher than the data. So that's where you expect to be now highlight all that insert and I want a stacked bar chart. Well, hasn't quite worked there as it is going to be a normal bar chart. So we're going to switch common row data, which will put all of those on a different series. So we can kind of start to see already how this is working here are the thin green and orange lines here are going to become the error bar, the caps that we have on. These are going to become the error bars themselves, and I'll just make this bottom half to no fill, click on the top half, no fill again. And again, you can start to see how this is going to work, right? So get rid of some background lines a bit quickly. And I'm going to fill the background a dark color just it's I'm working on my dark mode windows 11 experience now. So let's do some dark mode stuff. So dark background and what we're going to do on first thing, we're going to start drawing what our error bars going to look like. I'm going to start in this case with a box. I'm going to make three copies of it. So first learn to do this by trying to recreate making this really terrible now, right? Trying to create a replica of Excel's Christmas graph where they have Christmas presents and you could kind of sculpt in a Christmas present by using this technique. Anyway, I'm now going to set these ones on the outside to be no fill. No outline and I'm going to select one in the middle, right click group those together. Now if I control C that to copy it, I can then click on any of the series, I'll click on the top one and control V to paste it in. You can see I've now pasted that in now it's important to have these ones at the side that are transparent because if you just copied and pasted that square, it would fill the entire thing. So you need this on the side and if you want to make it maybe narrower, you can make it narrower copy the whole thing pasted in. So what I'm going to do is shape format that no outline, fill that with white control C, paste that in. It is it's simply a case of pasting that in and it is pasted in as an image now because I'm working with white, I'm just going to fill some squares here to be a darker color so I can at least see what I'm doing and that will be the bar that we're going to use. Now what about the cap? On this case I'm going to make it a bit wider, a bit narrower, control C that and paste it in. You can kind of see now we've got a much beefier, meatier looking error bar not like the single line that you can get. Now you might want to make that a little bit more visually interesting. So maybe I'll highlight that and I'm going to put a shape out line around it that matches the background and I'm going to ramp up the size of that to be quite thick and then control C that, control V onto there. And you can see I've now put a little like a separator, it's almost like a shadow on there which I think is quite a nice looking, kind of nice looking photographic error bar there, it's like it'd be assembled. So that's a little bit more flexible. Maybe I'll do something else, I'll do maybe illustrations, shapes, I'll put in a circle maybe and I'll do that shape outline, wide shape fill, none, maybe make the line a little bit fatter and I can control C that and put that in there. Now it's shrunk down to be a bit of a noble, but what if I wanted to be a complete circle or just increase that bar size. And because I've made this dynamic, it's not actually going to go up both there. So I can make that 0.5, it's going to always remain at the same point. Now if you are doing a circle like that, maybe you'd want to shift that up a bit, so you'd just have to take that into account here and maybe add in a 0.5 there, in fact it will be adding in a, adding that divided by a half roughly, isn't it? Yeah and then it would stick around at the center. So I'm going to remove that bit, send it back to 0.2, just put our original one in there. In fact I'm going to shrink this down a little bit because these always get pasted in kind of as like a picture, it will stretch and scale. So you kind of want to fiddle with it before you copy it and then paste it. That's kind of one limitation of this technique, you can't edit this after it's pasted in, you've got to generate the shape again or edit your shape and paste it back in. So if you're going to put in any shapes, probably keep like a stash of them somewhere on your worksheet because remember this is just like an area for you to work in, throw it in there and then paste it later. So you can play around with that, put in any shape you like. Now for the middle bit, I'm going to go for insert my illustrations and icons and you can pick any of these if you're on the newish version. I'm going to pick the one that's the the continents, these are the seven I picked earlier, I don't really pick them because I had six or seven rows of sample data when I was making it so I thought oh my continents match. So I'm going to go graphics fill, change these to white. They are in this little box so I can see them and now with this graph highlighted I'm going to get, oh I need to actually put that data in so I'm going to drag that box down and then drag all of this down to fill it up and this is why you need to be a bit careful because the the auto fill is going to try and be clever. For instance the top bar it's all kept at 0.2 fine but it's incremented this one by one each time so that's a bit odd and it's also incremented the marker by one so if we set that to one that can drag down two lines and then it's got the hint there. So what we've got there is what looks like you know your standard box and whisker chart isn't it already but I want to drag this to be where those yellow boxes are about approximately square. Now if I drag it to be wide and they're not quite square what I can do is boost the size of that marker and you can see they now become a little bit more square. If I change the aspect ratio to be a bit thinner maybe I want these to be much smaller maybe 0.7 for instance, positive 0.7 of course. So that's another bit of manual jiggery pokery that you need to do unfortunately I haven't quite forget how to make that perfectly dynamic but okay we will deal with that and so here we go there's our our box and this is still yellow we're going to replace that so I'm going to pick I'll go for Antarctic at first control C and then click on my middle sequence so all those orange ones highlighted and then control V and you notice it fills in the entire series just as the previous one did so I'm going to pick Australasia control C that and if I click on here that would paste it on everything but if I click again it's going to select just that data point not the whole series now I can control V into there now we'll go for Asia for Europe it's in there go for Africa next control C click click again control V and I'll do North and South America click click control V copy paste that click click control V so there is a kind of infographicy graphic I'm just going to change that axis to be to be white so we can see it so there we go so that is a little bit more black swaps drag that done down that's a little bit more interesting right let me drag you around and if you want to add the numbers well I've got this up here maybe I want to add data labels to it so if I add my data labels and I edit these I'll put the value from the cells so maybe I'll stick values from there take everything else off make it white we'll change the font to something a bit more aerial nova looks kind of trendy doesn't it she's got you selected and well that's that's kind of not those numbers it's kind of I want to label the upper and lower bounds so I'm going to create that I'm going to create two new columns plus and minus one being the data point plus the error bar one being the data point minus the error bar and let's send all that in um now if I change that I can put the plus numbers on there oops yeah that is correct isn't it and then option select range that one and for the bottom I'm going to stick some data labels here as well now when I select these make that white I need to go inside end I'm going to stick the value from cells being whatever the lower bound is it'll just so happen to be the same as the value in that case but we may as well keep it consistent so that column is these two columns are the same but we may as well uh keep them consistently calculated in case we fiddle out with some fiddle with something else later so what we got there is a nice looking infographic I don't know what that means it's just random data that are generated they're more interesting looking error bars we can make that quite small thin in which case we'll need to change the aspect ratio of the marker I'm changing that down to about 0.6 that looks all right that's about the right projection for the earth and you you can fiddle up out with this and just change all sorts of things with it just to see what you like what you feel like doing this is really just the introduction to a technique that you can play with using stacked bar charts and then pasting in images just to make it look more visually interesting you can play about with this and come up with all sorts of ideas for it