A system to generate a chart recommendation based on machine understanding of spreadsheet data, including a memory and a processing device coupled to the memory to identify a set of data that each include content of a cell of one or more cells in a column of a spreadsheet presented to a user of a user device; add, to metadata of the cell, an annotation associated with an entity type representing the semantic meaning of the data in the cell; determine, based on the annotation, an entity type representing a semantic meaning of the set of data in the column; identify at least one of a plurality of charts that is relevant to at least one of the entity type associated with the column, a user device characteristic associated with the user device, or a user class characteristic; and provide the identified chart for presentation to the user.