A method to generated a chart recommendation based on machine understanding of spreadsheet data, including determining 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. The method further determines an entity type associated with the column based on the set of data. The entity type represents a semantic meaning of the set of data in the column of the spreadsheet. The method further identifies at least one of a plurality of charts that is relevant to the entity type associated with the column. The method then provides the identified chart for presentation to the user.