To see how charts work we’re going to create a simple bar chart that shows sales by plant category.

The first step in creating a chart is to select the data you want to chart.

Click and drag to select the cells in the revenue column including the column title.

You'll also want to select the column that contains the labels that will be added to the chart. In this case the labels are found in the category column. Hold the Ctrl key, and click and drag to add the category labels to the selection.

Next, click the insert menu, then select chart. If you want Calc to use the values from the first column as labels, make sure the first column as label checkbox is selected.

You can also specify which worksheet will contain your finished graph. Leaving the chart results in worksheet list box set to the default value will generate the chart in the same worksheet that holds the chart data.

Since you've already selected the range you want to chart, click the next button to move to the next step.

This screen lets you select a chart type. If you're not sure what type of chart you want, click through some of the buttons and look at the results in the preview window.

Sometimes it's also useful to check the “check the show text elements in preview” checkbox to see how the various text elements will affect your chart.

Let’s create a horizontal bar chart. Select the icon showing the data as horizontal bars. Then click next.

This screen varies slightly for each of the different types of charts, in the case of a bar chart you could choose to stack values next to each other, show them as a percentage of the largest value or other variations. Most of these variations don't apply when there is only one column of data to be charted. We’ll create stacked graphs in another module but for now just make sure the normal variant is selected.

As their names suggest, the “grid lines” check boxes allow you to specify whether to display grid lines for both the x and y axes. You'll probably want to display grid lines on the Y axis for this type of chart.

Make sure the Y axis checkbox is selected then click next.

On this final screen, change the title to “Revenue by Category”. Notice how in the preview, there is only one item in the legend. A legend with only one item isn't very useful. Let’s remove it by deselecting the legend checkbox.

You could add titles to the X and Y axes if you like. In this case it’s pretty clear from the labels which axes is category and which one is the revenue amount. So we’ll leave them unlabeled. Make sure both of the axis titles checkboxes are unchecked and click create.

The chart will be added to the worksheet.