Creating Charts in Hindi with MS Excel

Introduction

A picture is worth a thousand words. Frequently in the course of work, one has to present statistical information in an easy to understand manner. Charts and graphs are an age old method to depict such data pictorially. However, for graphs and charts to convey meaning, they must carry some textual information as well. In order for graphs and charts to be most effective, it is best if this textual information is presented in the language most easily understood by the end user.

With Indic language computing, it is now possible to create the text labels that go with a chart in Hindi and other Indian languages.

The purpose of this tutorial is to elucidate the procedure of creating charts and graphs in Hindi using MS Excel, the Microsoft Office spreadsheet application, from the entering of the data, to the actual representation as a graph or chart object.

Entering the data

In order to create charts and graphs, you will first need to create an MS Excel Worksheet and enter some data into it. To create a new MS Excel Worksheet: Right click anywhere on the desktop From the New tab, choose the "Microsoft Excel Worksheet" option A new icon will be created on your desktop, with the name "New Microsoft Excel Worksheet". Double click this icon to open the Worksheet

You should now see something like this:

MS Excel stores data in blocks known as cells. Each cell has a name composed of a letter and a number. As you can see above, the first cell above has the name A1. The name of the cell can be seen in the Name Box on the top left corner.

You can now enter data in Hindi, directly into this worksheet. You can start Hindi input using the Hindi IME. Please see the tutorial on how to use the Hindi IME.

After activating the Hindi IME, enter the data in the cells as shown below:

As you can see the cells A1-6 contain text and the cells B1-6 contain numerical data. The numerical data will be represented on the chart/graph and the text information will constitute the labels.

Creating a Bar Graph

You can now create a bar graph from the data you have entered. In order to create a bar graph, first select the cells containing the labels and the data. You do this by clicking the top left cell of the block you wish to select. Then drag the white cross pointer over the cells to be selected to the lower right cell of the block. Once you have selected the cells, click the Chart Wizard icon on the tool bar. From the menu displayed, select ‘Bar’ graph

You should now see something like this on your screen:

You can customize the chart as much as required. However for the purpose of this tutorial, we will leave the default settings in place.

Proceed with the wizard until the point shown below:

You can now choose to embed the chart into the same sheet as the one in which you have been working or as a separate sheet. For the tutorial, we will keep it as an object in the same sheet. When you click finish, the chart will be created in the sheet. As you can see below, the labels are in Hindi. You have just created your first Hindi bar graph

Creating a Pie Chart

Creating a pie chart is exactly like creating a bar graph. Follow the same steps as above to the point where you start the Chart Wizard. At this stage, instead of the Bar graph, choose a Pie Chart as shown below:

With this example, we will see how to add a pie chart as a separate sheet. Follow the wizard from the point above, till you are asked to choose between an embedded object in the current sheet and a separate sheet. Choose the "As New Sheet" option.

You will now see the Chart added as a separate sheet

These graphs and charts can now be added to other documents such as MS Word documents and MS PowerPoint presentations.