Creating Charts in Kannada with MS Excel

Introduction

To put across Statistical information in an easy to understand manner is not simple. One the most effective ways of managing this is pictorial representation of the statistical data. 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 Kannada and other Indian languages. The purpose of this tutorial is to elucidate the procedure of creating charts and graphs in Kannada 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 In order to create a free e-mail account with Microsoft Hotmail, go to www.hotmail.com. 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 Kannada, directly into this worksheet. You can start Kannada input using the Kannada IME. Please see the tutorial on how to use the Kannada IME. After activating the Kannada IME, enter the data in the cells as shown below: As you can see the cells A1-12 contain text and the cells B1-12 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 Kannada. You have just created your first Kannada bar graph. Graphs created in this way, can now be added to other documents such as MS Word documents and MS PowerPoint presentations.