Excel Charts
A powerful way to extend the usefulness of your Excel templates
Add your own charts
Systems2win provides many charts on many templates, but one of the huge benefits of being written in native Microsoft Excel is that you can add as many user-defined charts as you need.
Excellent training is available as part of Excel's standard Help. Ctrl+F1
Tip: In addition to the popular Analysis Pak, there are also many Excel Add-ins available for even fancier charts.
Hidden data
You can set your charts to include hidden data - or not.
Tools > Options > Chart > Plot Visible Cells Only
Excel 2007+: Click the chart (which will then display new menu options in the Ribbon bar) > Design tab > Select Data > Show Data in Hidden Rows and Columns
Selecting what you want within a chart
When working with charts, you will get very different menu choices when you right-click in different places on the chart. It is not uncommon to have to experiment with right-clicking in several places before finding the menu you're looking for.
It is sometimes easier to use:
- The Excel 97-2003 Chart menu:
which appears in your Command Bar at the top of the page when you click anywhere on a chart. - The Excel 2007+ Chart tools menu:
which appears above your Ribbon menu when you click anywhere on a chart.
To select the entire chart, hold down the Ctrl key as you left-click anywhere on the chart.
Aligning chart bars with row heights
When using the Gantt Chart or Standard Work Combination Sheet...
to precisely line up the chart bars with their corresponding rows
(which are slightly different sizes in different versions of Excel)
click the radio button With Labels, and then select the entire chart (including its grey background area), and drag the top and bottom center handles to increase or decrease the height of the entire chart until the rows line up precisely.
How to manually re-align charts in Excel 2007+
When toggling between the With Labels and Without Labels radio buttons in Excel 2007+, you may need to manually re-size the width of the chart
Click on a blank area inside the body of the chart, |
Then to resize the chart... |
