If you haven’t used Excel’s People Graph add-in yet, you’ll like it if you need to show a quantity of people or a handful of other objects for any reason. It’s part of a recent update of Excel 2016 for both Windows and Mac. Here’s an example:
We have a list of the populations of northeastern US states.
Click anywhere in the list. On the ribbon bar, go to the Insert tab, then in the Add-ins group, click People Graph. (If your Excel screen is narrow, Add-ins may be a drop-down you have to click, first.)
This puts a sample graph on the worksheet. Click it or roll your mouse over the upper-right corner, and you’ll see a couple of buttons. Click the grid-like button.
In the pop-up screen, type a title for the chart, then click Select Your Data. In this example, we’ll select the whole range, from A1 through B10, including the column headers.
Click the green Create button , and you’re done! You may see a message telling you to stretch out the chart so you can see all the data. If necessary, you can zoom out on the page.
If you click the gear button in the upper-right corner, you’ll see options that let you choose the overall format of the chart, how the figure will look, and what shape you get – a person figure, cat, dolphin, diamond, and a few more. Unfortunately, there isn’t an option to use a custom shape.