Formatting Charts

Just as you can format your data, you can format and reformat your charts. And as with data in cells, there are plenty of ways to modify chart appearances: by changing colors, text fonts, or borders around the plot area, or by introducing data labels, chart titles, and the like.

Of course, you need to know how to get to all these options—and in keeping with Excel's general approach, there are several ways available. Let's take a look at them.

The first step in the formatting process, as usual, is to click the object you want to format (depending on which approach you use, that click might utilize the left or right button, as I'll discuss). You need to be clear about exactly which object you have in mind, because it's easy to think you're about to click the major gridlines when you've really hovered your mouse over the plot area. That's where Excel's chart captions come in; again, resting your mouse over a chart object triggers an identifying caption.