Simple Charting Tricks
Here are some simple charting tricks that have become invaluable to me. It can often times be difficult to get PowerPoint and Excel to bend to your will. Sometimes you need to chart to look a certain way. Sometimes you simply need go beyond the limited flexibility of these applications to make you chart labels to not look amateurish. Below are some of the things I do on a regular basis. None of these ae game changers, but they have all saved my time an aggravation since I started using them. So, let’s look at a few best practices in chart production.
Automatically Labels for Zero Values
Getting rid of those annoying zero value labels is easy. All that needs to be done is to format each of the labels in the data series as a custom number.
0%;-0%; #,###””;#,###””
+0%;-0%;0% +””#,##0””;-””#,##0””;””#,##0””
Clean Up Chart Axis Labels
If you’ve ever created a chart with really long labels, you know how bad it looks when those labels wrap. Exhibit A:
1. Go to Paragraph and right align the labels
2. Go to Edit Data and use ALT + Enter to put line breaks where you want them.
Stop Chart Labels from Wrapping
I don’t love pie charts. I tend to use them sparingly. If you’ve ever tried to shrink the size of a pie chart you will often see the data labels wrap.
Wrapped Data Labels
From here, go to Text Options and simply uncheck the 'Wrap text in shape' option. I like to also reduce all the margins around the labels to zero - which I like to do for any chart I make.
Formatted Data Labels
