Creating Effective Charts (Course Id 2882)

1. Who is this course for?

This course is designed for CPAs, accountants, and other professionals seeking Continuing Professional Education (CPE) who use Microsoft Office 365, Excel 2016 or later, and want to improve their ability to create and present effective charts.

2. What is this course about or what problem does this course solve?

This course teaches participants how to create, edit, format, customize, and present Excel charts effectively, helping them transform complex numerical data into clear visual presentations that improve understanding, highlight trends, identify outliers, and support faster decision-making.

3. Where can the knowledge from this course be used?

The knowledge gained from this course can be applied in financial reporting, management reporting, business analysis, client presentations, internal communications, and any professional environment where Excel charts are used in PowerPoint or Word documents to communicate data visually.

4. Why is this course important to a CPA or Accountant?

This course is important because CPAs and accountants frequently communicate financial and operational data to clients, management, and stakeholders, and effective charting skills help present information more clearly, professionally, and persuasively while improving the quality of reports and presentations.

5. When is this course relevant or timely?

This course is relevant whenever professionals need to create data-driven reports or presentations using modern versions of Excel and Microsoft Office, particularly when visual communication of financial or business information is required.

6. How is a course like this consumed or used?

This self-study text course is completed independently by reading the course material, reviewing chart creation and presentation concepts, and successfully passing the 25-question final examination with a score of at least 70% to earn 5.0 CPE credits.

The Journal of Accountancy stated that audiences understand and remember numerical information more easily when a CPA presents it visually as well as verbally. Charts can make complex data easier to understand, highlight trends and can identify outliers more readily than numbers alone. It can also facilitate quicker decision making by summarizing information visually.

This course covers the basics of creating, editing and formatting a chart and more. It also shows you how to create a default chart as well as a custom chart. It discusses different chart types such as a combination chart, 2 y axis chart, stock charts, funnel charts and waterfall charts. The course also discusses how to efficiently link your Excel charts into PowerPoint and Word so that your presentations are always up-to-date.

Course Learning Objectives

 By the end of the course participants should be able to:

1. Differentiate between the different chart types and recognize their components so that they can select the appropriate chart type to use for a particular presentation.
2. Recognize the different steps involved in creating charts.
3. Recognize how to edit existing charts by resizing, changing chart type, moving chart elements and adding/ deleting data series by using contextual tabs menus and short cut keys
4. Recognize how to apply formatting techniques, such as colors and inserting objects such as graphics, to a chart. 
5. Recognize how to change the default chart type.
6. Recognize the steps required to create custom chart types and how to save them as templates to improve efficiency.
7. Differentiate between the different methodologies of linking Excel data and using static Excel data into PowerPoint presentations.
8. Recognize how fonts, colors, graphics, documentation and printing can impact the professionalism of a PowerPoint presentation.