A method and apparatus for generating charts within a document generation application is provided. The method comprises, within a document generation application, tabular data; associating, for each column and each row of the tabular data, the labels and the numerical data contained therein with one of a plurality of data types; determining, without user input, that the tabular data is one of column-oriented or row-oriented; selecting the first column or the first row as corresponding to an x-axis, respectively; applying a heuristic model resulting in a selection of a chart type of a plurality of chart types, the selection made without user input; automatically generating a chart of the selected chart type depicting a graphical representation of the labels and the numerical data.