Microsoft Excel 365 has a lot of great formatting features to make your charts appears more professional and attractive from a visual perspective. As Excel users learn how to utilize these features to their advantage, they can produce clean attractive looking documents that will communicate their source data in a professional manner. Some of these Excel chart formatting features include Gridlines, Trendlines, Data Tables and Chart Filters.
We can examine each of these items to better understand how you can use them to help make your Excel charts look and communicate better.
Add Data Tables
Data Tables are an interesting feature of Excel charts. Data Tables are normally added to charts to highlight key data points alongside of the graphical chart components and can easily be implemented in an Excel chart. Data tables will allow users to display a lot of pertinent information into a single chart graphic. Activating a Data Table on an Excel chart can be completed by adjusting the Data Table checkbox option on or off in the Chart Elements menu. Users also have the ability to add and remove legend keys, in the Data Table submenu.
Displaying Data Trends with Trendlines
Trendlines are an effective tool for showing movement in your data. Trendlines are used to visually represent trends in chart data over time and can easily be implemented in an Excel chart. Turning on and off Trendlines on an Excel chart is a pretty easy procedure, all one needs to do is to toggle the trendline checkbox option to the on or off position in the Chart Elements menu.
Use Gridlines to Visually Segment Your Data
Gridlines are a useful tool to visually show changes in values on an Excel Chart. Both Vertical and Horizonal Gridlines can be used in certain excel chart types such as bar charts, line charts and column charts. Turning on Gridlines is very simple to do, all you need to do is to toggle the horizontal or vertical gridline checkbox options boxes on or off in the Chart Elements menu.
Chart Filters
The final item we will examine today are Chart Filters. Chart Filters are very useful tools for emphasizing specific parts of your data in a chart. Users can focus in on specific pieces of information from single or multiple data fields. Adding and editing Chart Filters can be accomplished by activating the Chart Filter table and then configuring the data fields that you would like displayed.
Using some or all of these Excel Chart features will help you make more beautiful and effective charts.
