How to make the default area chart in Microsoft Excel more attractive
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Loading... - Koffi Coffie
- 29 Sep 2022
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Area charts do a great job of exposing trends in Microsoft Excel data. The good news is that they’re easy to create; the bad news is that the default chart is often unsuitable for distribution because of the formatting. The chart is ugly because Excel applies different colors to each area, and they don’t look good together. Fortunately, it takes only a few minutes to tweak the default formatting, and the results are more than suitable.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you a few tweaks that can quickly improve the looks of Excel’s default area chart. Although we’re working with an area chart, you can apply these simple format changes to most chart types.
I’m using Microsoft 365 Desktop on a Windows 10 64-bit system, but you can use earlier versions of Excel. Excel for the web supports charts.
You can download the Microsoft Excel demo file for this tutorial.
How to create an area chart in Excel
An area chart represents numeric data, usually over time. Visually, it’s a combination of a bar and line chart. Another way to describe an area chart is a line chart with the area below shaded to the baseline. You can use an area chart to plot a single line and shaded area, but most area charts plot multiple lines (data series) so you can break down the trend between groups compared to the whole. Read More...
