Designing Good-Looking Bar Charts

In EXCEL you can create poorly-designed charts. By focusing on data patterns rather supportive references, you can make attractive charts. Follow these principles: no frame, no vertical axis, no ticks, and grey grid.

1) In this default bar graph, I added text ("Grades after"), moved the legend to the top of the graph, and changed the color of similar items to closely-related colors.		2) A much better looking graph has no border and rounded percentages.
3) Now, remove the ticks and turn the black lines into grey ones on both the vertical axis and horizontal axis.		4) Finally, remove the vertical axis itself and the frames around each of the bars. You could also cover the "30" with an all-white square from the Draw menu. That is a fine looking graph!
Source: Ideas from Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.