Instructions for Creating Stock Charts
1. Open an Excel document. Go to Tools>Options>General tab and on “sheets in new
workbook.” Change the number from “3” to
the number of stocks you are doing (Fig.1).
Close the current workbook and reopen a new
one. You should now see a new workbook
with the proper amount of sheets for your
project.
2. Label Cell A1 as Date, B1 as Price and C1 as
Net Change. Double click on the line
between the column headers to adjust the
cell’s size to fit the text (Fig. 2). You will
have to do this again as you enter data into Fig. 1
the cells.
Fig. 2
3. Format Column A by clicking on the column header A (Fig. 3). This highlights the entire
column. Right click and choose “Format Cells.”
Click on the "Numbers” tab and then click on “Date.”
On the right side, choose how you want the to display
the date. Do the same for Column B and Column C Fig. 3
except choose “Currency”.
4. In Column A, type in the first date of the stock price.
Grab the lower right corner of cell A1 and drag it
downward to add additional dates (Fig. 4).
5. In Column B, type in the closing price for the
stock each day. Fig. 4
6. In Column C, cell C2, type in the change in price for the first day. In cell C3, type this
formula: =SUM(B3-B2), then push the “Enter” key. The difference in price should be
recorded in cell C3. The spreadsheet should look
like the one in (Fig.5). As previously done in Step
3, grab the lower right corner of cell C3 and drag to
the last line of prices in Column B. All of the Net
Changes should now be recorded in Column C.
Fig. 5
7. Highlight the area where the data is entered by clicking
in Cell A1 and dragging to Cell C11 (Fig. 6).
Fig. 6
8. Select the Chart Wizard from the toolbar (Fig. 7).
Fig. 7
9. The wizard will display a wide range of charts. You
must use a line chart. Click on the line chart and a selection of line charts will display. You
must use the “line with markers displayed at each data value” (Fig. 8).
Fig. 8
10. Click “next” to go onto Step #2. There
are no changes to make on step #2.
11. Click “next” to go onto Step #3.
12. For a nicer looking chart: Fill in the
“Chart title”, “X-axis” (Dates) and the
“Y-axis” (Price). You can skip this step
if you want. Click “finish” (Fig. 9).
Fig. 9
13. Clicking on the finish button should give you a chart that looks like the one below (Fig. 10):
$60.00
$50.00
$40.00
$30.00 Price
$20.00 Net Change
$10.00
$0.00
1/11/01
1/12/01
1/13/01
1/14/01
1/15/01
1/16/01
1/17/01
1/18/01
1/19/01
1/20/01
-$10.00
Fig. 10
14. The chart can now be printed or cut and pasted into a MS Word document.