Last month, we covered the basic steps in creating an Excel chart as well as a few extra tricks such as setting a default chart type and using one of your own charts as a template. Few users, however, stop with placing a chart onto a worksheet. They typically want to customize the overall look and probably tweak elements such as some of Excel’s automatically generated labels, too. This month, we dig into a few features that can help you tailor your newly created charts.

Moving & Resizing

Formatting Elements

You can customize most parts in a chart to your liking. To change the bars in a bar chart, for example, click a bar. By default, this selects all of the chart’s bars, but you can select a single bar by clicking it a second time. Once the bars (or bar) are selected, you can alter their color, border, shadow, and 3D effects. Right-click the selected bar and choose Format Data Point. (The option will be Format Data Series if you’ve selected all the bars.) The resulting dialog box presents tools for adjusting the aspects listed above. Experiment with different chart types to find the tools for formatting lines, pie sections, and more. A few simple formatting changes can make one piece of data jump out, making the chart’s message clear.

You also can pick an element to format by clicking the chart and clicking Chart Area in the Current Selection section on the Format tab. Choose an element, such as Legend or Series 1, and click Format Selection.

Remake a chart’s overall look in one step by applying a style. Click the chart and click an option in the Design tab’s Chart Styles section to alter the overall color scheme. On the same tab, you can use the Chart Layouts options to try a variety of looks that affect labels, width of elements, and more. Remember that even after applying one of these styles or layouts, you can customize parts of the chart using the steps listed above.

You can add text wherever you need a little more explanation on a chart. You might, for example, want actual sales figures to appear on each section of a pie chart. To add a label that shows the data from the cell behind the pie section, right-click the section and choose Add Data Label. Once the label appears, you can move it to a new position and format it by clicking inside the label and then double-clicking it and making changes with the formatting toolbar that appears (or the Font section of the Home tab). You also can change the text in the label by clicking inside it and typing new text.

Updating Numbers & Legends

You don’t have to worry about updating chart information drawn from the original source cells. Charts are linked to cells that produce them, so changes you make in cells automatically change the chart. If, for example, you change a sales team’s results cell and press ENTER, the team’s bar in a bar chart changes accordingly. This explains why you can’t click into a legend’s text box and change the words. These are drawn from a cell, so you need to make the changes there.

Adjusting An Axis

Excel automatically creates axis scales based on your data. If a column chart’s highest value is $7,900, for example, Excel sets the vertical axis to top out at $8,000. You can adjust these settings to better tell the data story you have in mind. Right-click the numbers in the vertical axis, for example, and choose Format Axis. Now you can set the maximum value on the axis, as well as control details such as where and how often tick marks appear.

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