ASSIGNMENT: Utilizing the common-size financial statement information and/or Ratio work completed I want you to graph TWO of the ratios into ONE chart to provide a visual representation of the story. Graphing provides a visual method of representing the ratio making trends more apparent and can help you in part 2b. Remember in your graph you must clearly present the data. Ensure enough information is displayed for a reviewer to understand what they are looking at (ex. Titles, what are the axis) without being cluttered (too much information distracts from the story). Attach your file as an Excel file (.xls or .xlsx)

When choosing what ratio to present think about:

• What financial ratios mean to a business, and
• How some ratios relate to each other.

First ask yourself questions such as if this company is making sales, are it also making a profit? Then understand the context: What do you need your audience to know? After thinking about the question you want to ask, then choose an appropriate visual display. Then choose a visual display that will enable you to make this clear. Chart these two trends against each other in the same chart. Below are some of the charts recommendations.

• Simple text When you have just a number or two to share.
• Tables To communicate various units of measure.
• Heat map To visualize data in tabular format but leveraging color to convey the relative magnitude of the numbers.
• Scatterplot Showing the relationship between two things.
• Lines Most commonly used to plot continuous data.
• Slope graph Useful when you have two time periods of comparison and show relative differences across categories.
• Column chart Easy to see quickly which category is the biggest, smallest, and the incremental difference between categories.
• Stacked Column chart Used to show the totals across different categories but also subcomponent pieces vertically.
• Bar chart Similar to column chart but horizontal, use if your category names are long.
• Stacked bar chart Used to show the totals across different categories but also subcomponent pieces.
• Waterfall chart Used to pull apart the pieces of a stacked bar chart to show a starting point, differences, and the ending point.

Note that pie charts are NOT mentioned. Pie charts typically are a poor use of visual information, if you only have two pieces of data it is easier to just state it, if more data points, a pie chart is not your best option.