Charts and Graphs

Make funky and creative hand-drawn chart in Excel – Quick tutorial

Last updated on August 16, 2018

Chandoo

Charts are great way to tell story about what is going on in your business. But they also feel a bit too impersonal and meh. How about adding your personality to them? I don’t mean making them tall, dark and pretty. I mean using hand-drawing style to make them pop out. Something like this example of hand-drawn chart:

The best thing is, You don’t need to actually draw these charts by hand. We can use a powerful charting trick to get these charts automatically generated (and linked) to your data. Interested? Read on to learn how to create hand-drawn charts in Excel.

Hand-drawn charts – Set up your data

Let’s say you have some data like this:

Add 2 more columns so that you can split the data in to Head & Rest like this:

Make a regular stacked column chart from your data

Select head & rest columns and insert a normal stacked column chart. Make sure head is on top of rest. You will get this:

Time to get drawing – create head & body images

Using your favorite drawing program (MS Paint / Power Point / Paint.Net or good old Excel itself), make a column drawing. Use the free form scribble tool from Insert > Shape to create these drawings in Excel or Power Point. See this demo:

How to create a hand-drawn column or bar in Excel?

Crop and split the drawing in to head & rest:

Once you made the drawing, paste it in to Excel as an image. Using Format ribbon, crop this in to head & tail as shown below:

Replace the column fill with images now – Ctrl+C Ctrl+V time…

Time to use the most important shortcuts in the world. CTRL+C and CTRL+V.

Copy the head image from your drawing (CTRL+C)
Select head series in the chart
Paste (CTRL+V)

Bonus tip: Use images and shapes in your charts to prettify them

That is all. Your hand-drawn chart is ready. Share it with a colleague or boss and see them drool.

More hand-drawn inspiration for you…

Here are few more examples of what you could achieve with this technique.

Hand-drawn bar chart:

Hand-drawn line chart:

Caution: Don’t go overboard

I am a big fan of story telling with charts. While I appreciate the flexibility and possibilities Excel (and other tools like Power BI) offers, I strongly recommend that you do not go overboard with formatting charts. When used in moderation (or for a particular situation) these charts can evoke a laugh, thought or both. But when used in excess or out-of-place these can look silly. You have been warned.