Choose the graphic you're going to use for the data you're trying to represent. If you're trying to depict the number of students in your class whose favorite desserts are cake, pie, ice cream and cookies, you might choose a smiley face or a picture of an ice cream cone to represent each student or group of students.
Choose the number of students each image will represent. In your pictograph, one smiley face could mean one student or five students, or even 5,000 students, depending on your sample size. Choose a size so that you'll have a meaningful variety of answers. If one smiley face means 50 students, and you interview only 60, you'll have fractions of smiley faces when you could have multiple faces on each row.
Open your word-processing application. If you have OpenOffice, click on "Text Document," "Table," "Insert," "Table." An "Insert Table" dialog box will open.
Use the drop-down menus to make two columns and the number of rows for your data. You need a title row and, for the example here, four rows for data -- five rows in total. Click "OK" when you are done.
Put the arrow on the center line between the two columns and move it over to the left so that about a quarter of the row space is in the left column, and the rest is in the right column. In the top row, write "Desserts" in the left column and "Students" in the right column.
Enter "Cookies," "Ice Cream," "Cake" and "Pies." in the other rows in the left column. Now your outline is ready for your pictograph images to go in the right column.