Using Names can lead to more flexibility in defining the data in your charts. A bit more complicated is to use Excel’s Names to define the series data for your chart. The easiest way is to use Tables as the chart source data. There are a couple ways to create charts that will grow with your data. If the data in the cells changes, so does the chart, but if the data extends to more cells (or shrinks to fewer cells), the chart doesn’t seem to notice. But once you’ve created a chart, it keeps plotting data from the same cells. It’s pretty easy to set up data and create a chart in Excel. This exercise was done completely in Mac Excel 2016, and other than not knowing a few of the shortcuts I use everyday, it was not very different from working in Windows Excel 2016. The protocols are the same for Mac Excel and Windows Excel, and perhaps it’s time for a quick review.

So I dusted off my MacBook Pro and tried it out.īottom line: There are several ways to make dynamic charts in Excel, and there seems to be no difference other than cosmetic in how they work between different versions of Excel, and between operating system. Good question, and I wondered if he’d encountered some unexpected problem, perhaps a bug, in Mac Excel. A reader emailed to ask whether you could make a dynamic chart using OFFSET-function-based Names in Excel 2016 for Mac.