Creating charts in Excel is pretty straightforward and you can see how to that in this video, getting started with charts. What normally happens is you select a group of cells and then insert a chart but what do you do when the cells are not next to each other. For example, what if the data you want to plot is in column 1 and column 3 of a table?
Here is a video showing you how to do this.
Gary Schwartz's Blog 
It is not that simple for XY charts. When I do exactly as you show, an XY chart shows up with the rightmost column plotted, with just an index for the X axis. I cannot find a way to add the first column as the X value.