Chart formatting options - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

- [Instructor] Okay, now it's time to talk about chart formats. And I feel very strongly about formatting. I think it's one of those skillsets that tends to go very much under utilized. The thing is if you take the time to master the options and capabilities that Excel offers, in terms of chart formatting, you can build some incredibly beautiful, unique visualizations in Excel. So let's go back to our Customizing Charts tab. And like most things in Excel, there are multiple ways to accomplish the same thing. In this case I'm going to show you two different approaches to formatting a chart. And the first is to select either the whole chart or a particular element within the chart. I'm going to select the entire one first. And go into that Chart Tools header, and drill down into the Format options. Now, these options are pretty high-level. They're very much focused on colors, and styles, and effects, so what you can do is, you know, play with different fills. As you can see it's filling the entire chart area since that's what I have selected. You could add an outline to it if you want, or shape effect. And just like we saw with the elements in the Design tab, there are preset styles that you can use. Again, I don't like using them, I like to create things myself. And so, you can see the difference if I select an individual element now. Now I have some different options and if I choose fill, it's only filling that element that I've selected. And same goes for these text effects. So, I don't want to spend much more time on these options because to be honest, they're pretty weak. The way that I like to format my charts is through the second option which is by right clicking any element within your chart and choosing the Format Axis, or Format option, which tends to be the bottom choice in your menu. So because I've selected the Axis, I see Format Axis, I can right click Format Legend. I can right click a Series, Format Data Series, same goes with Title. So if I click through any of these format lengths, it's going to open up my Formatting pane to the right of the screen, and this is where I have full access into the most granular formatting tools and options you can imagine. Any element within your chart has it's own set of formatting options. So right now, since I clicked through the Title Formatting, I'm seeing a preselected list of options that can be applied to the Chart Title. So I can do, Fill Options here, if I want to give it some sort of background, I can do that. I can give it a border. Let's just make it a dark gray border. And what's important to keep in mind is that I'm actually not limited to just the options here in this Formatting pane, I can go all the way up to my Home tab, and make any adjustments to the font or alignment that I could with any other text. So let's make this chart title bold, and let's drop it down to size 12. So there you go. And what's awesome about this Format panel is now I can drop down this little arrow spinner here, and see a menu of elements that are available for me to format. So I'm in the Chart Title options right now, I could go to the Vertical (Value) Axis here, and you can see a whole different set of options appear. Now there are hundreds and hundreds of options and suboptions within this formatting pane, so I'm not going to go through all of them. But what I will do is show you a number of these different choices, and options in context as we go through demos and exercises later in the course. So, I'll show you just a couple here. The Axis options include a new series here, or a new setting here with a bunch of drop downs. So Axis Options, let me do things like change the minimum or maximum. Again, being careful not to show a misleading, or skewed axis can change things like the tick marks. Now it can make inside tick marks for the majors. I can also change the units. So right now it's counting by 100,000, I can change that to count by 200,000s. And it will eliminate some of the values or the labels. You can also change the number from currency to a number with or without a separator. And again, just like the chart title, you can jump to my home menu if I choose, maybe drop down a size, maybe make it bold if I choose. You know, that's up to me. Now the last thing I'll note is that you can also select and just straight up remove elements of the chart if you choose to. So, these data labels obviously are just really busy and distracting, so you can select one set of data labels, and just hit delete. And they go away. Doesn't change the underlying data, or anything like that. It just removes the labels. And I'll show you one more example before we move on. I'm going to right click the data series, and here I have specific Series Options. And this is great, this is where I could plot on a secondary axis, or I could change the overlap, or the gap width. So let's say I want to make these columns a little wider, I can go ahead and change these options right here in my Series Options. So there you go, that's your quick primer on formatting charts.