This is a guide on how to make A Fred Chart visually appealing in excel. For this guide, I compared the growth in manufacturing vs growth in manufacturing jobs in the USA.

1. HOW TO MAKE A FRED CHART
VISUALLY APPEALING IN EXCEL
BY CHRIS BARAMBONA

2. FIRST STEP:
GET YOUR
DATA
For this guide, I am going to compare the
growth in manufacturing vs growth in
manufacturing jobs in the USA.
All my data will be from FRED (Federal
reserve economic data).

3. RESULT FROM
FRED

4. HOW TO MAKE
FRED’S CHART
MORE APPEALING
First Step: Download
the data from FRED as
Excel Data.

5. HOW TO MAKE
FRED’S CHART
MORE APPEALING
Second step: open the
downloaded excel work
sheet

6. HOW TO MAKE
FRED’S CHART
MORE APPEALING
Third step: Remove all
unneeded cells and columns
and make understandable
titles for your columns.
**Example:
OUTMS_PC1 = Growth in manufacturing

7. HOW TO MAKE
FRED’S CHART
MORE APPEALING
Fourth step: Create a chart for
your data.

8. HOW TO MAKE
FRED’S CHART
MORE APPEALING
Fifth step: Make a title for
your chart.

9. HOW TO MAKE
FRED’S CHART
MORE APPEALING
Sixth step: make the
visualization easier
In this case, I repositioned the
date, made the text direction
horizontal instead of rotated,
and removed all the straight
lines in the middle.

10. HOW TO MAKE
FRED’S CHART
MORE APPEALING
Seventh step: Highlight any
important data
In this case, I highlighted what
is the latest available data on
the Growth in manufacturing
VS Growth in manufacturing
jobs.

11. HOW TO MAKE
FRED’S CHART
MORE APPEALING
Last step: Make your last touch
In this case, I changed the
background color, made boxes
for my highlighted data, made
the lines thicker, and
repositioned the “Legend” to
make the chart more
appealing.

12. THANK YOU!

13. SOURCE
“Manufacturing Sector: Output for All Employed Persons.” stlouisfed, 15 Sept.
2021, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS#0.