Make Sense of Chart Elements and Chart Formats

Make Sense of Chart Elements and Chart Formats

Create your first chart and get familiar with chart elements and formatting options. 

When to use

We use chart elements and formatting whenever we want to add elements such as a legend, chart title, data labels, etc. to our chart and change the look and feel using formatting. 

Instructions

In this lesson, we're going to build our first chart and explore chart elements and contextual ribbons.

In this dataset, we have some Products listed in column B, regions (North, South, East, and West) in column C, and the Sales in column D. We need to represent this data in a chart.

Remember, we can remove gridlines to give our canvas a clean look.

• View > Untick Gridlines

Recommended Charts

When it comes to actually building a chart there are a couple of different ways we can go about this.

We can use Recommended Charts.

• Click in the data.
• On the Insert tab, click Recommended Charts.

Excel will look at our data and suggest some charts that we could possibly create.

If there is one that suits our needs, we can simply select it and click OK.

Create a Clustered Column Chart

There are two ways to create a clustered column chart.

• Click anywhere in the dataset.
• From the Insert tab, in the Charts group, click the drop-down arrows next to column chart.
• Choose a column chart from the list.

This will create a column chart using all of the data in the dataset as we did not specify any specific columns or rows.

However, we only want to create a chart that shows the Sales by Product for Q1 Sales, Q2 Sales, Q3 Sales and Q4 Sales.

• Select the Product column.
• Hold down CTRL and select the Q1 Sales, Q2 Sales, Q3 Sales, and Q4 Sales columns.

In this example, we are not using the Region column in the chart.

• From the Insert tab, in the Charts group, click the drop-down arrows next to column chart.
• Choose 2D Clustered Column from the list.
• With the chart inserted, use the resize handles to adjust the size of the chart to fit.

Chart Design and Format Ribbons

When we are clicked on a chart, two new contextual ribbons will appear: Chart Design and Format. These ribbons contain all the tools we need to design and format our charts.

Chart Design

The Chart Design tab is where we go to add chart elements, apply quick layouts change the color of the chart, etc.

Let’s look at each in more detail.

Chart Elements – Chart Elements are the different parts that make up a chart. For example, the chart title, the axis, the legend, the gridlines, etc. Each of these can be individually formatted.

Quick Layouts – Quick Layouts are pre-built chart layouts that apply multiple chart elements at once.

Change Color – Change Color is where we go to change the look and feel of our chart. The color palettes we see in the drop-down menu are based on the theme we have in use in Excel. If we change the theme, the colors will also change.

Chart Styles – Chart Styles are pre-built style that contain chart elements and formatting. We can save time by applying one of these chart styles as it means we don’t have to format each element individually.

Switch Row and Column – Click this button to switch the row and the column data around.

Select Data – This is where we go to change the range of data the chart is using. We can also toggle different series off and on from here.

Change Chart Type – We can change our chart type at any time. For example, if we’ve created a bar chart, we can change it to a pie chart from here.

Move Chart – We can use this button to move our chart to another worksheet. This is the same as performing a Copy/Cut and Paste.

Format Tab

The Format tab is where we go to change the look and feel of our chart. We can change the color and style of every chart element. Notice the Shape Fill and Shape Outline menus.

Remember, it’s important to ensure we are clicked on the correct chart element before applying formatting.

To select chart elements:

• Click on the element in the chart OR,
• Click the Format tab, go to the Current Selection group, and click the drop-down arrow.
• Select the relevant chart element from the list.

Note: We can apply similar design and formatting options by clicking the three icons to the right of the chart.