Editing charts in Excel

Charts help you visualise your data better. They contain several elements, such as a plot area, chart title, axis labels, axis titles, a legend and grid lines. You may choose to hide or display these elements and you can also change their location and formatting. In this video, we are going to learn to edit a chart in Excel. Here is a set of data from Pew Research Center about the percentage of US adults who say they mostly go online using a cell phone. We need to convert this into a chart. For that, we select data that needs to be converted into a chart and select insert.

You can either use the Recommended Charts feature or click on a chart out of the various options available. Here, we choose to represent the data with a simple bar chart. If you want to change the chart type into say a line, scatterplot, histogram or box plot, then click on Chart Design, followed by Change Chart Type. Choose from the options that drop down to edit the chart type. Here we choose to change this chart into a scatterplot.

To add or remove elements from your chart, follow these steps. First click on the chart. Then click on Chart Design. Under the Chart Design, you will find a command to add Chart Element. Choose the chart elements that you wish to add to your charts. Now, pause the video and observe the chart on the screen. What elements do you think are missing? Are axes titles missing from the chart? Yes, let us add them to the chart.

We have to ensure that a chart has the correct titles for both horizontal and vertical axes. Pause the video again and think what else is missing from the chart? A chart title perhaps? Let us give this chart a title.

If you ever want to add a trendline to your line chart, click on the chart. Then click on Chart Design. Choose Trendline from the dropdown list of chart elements. You have options ranging from linear to moving average to choose from.

After you create a chart, you might want to change the way the rows and the columns are plotted for better visualisation. For example, in this chart, the chart emphasises the percentage of US adults based on age group. Let us try to change the emphasis to the years 2013 and 2019 by switching the row and column this time. If you’re still not satisfied with the way the chart appears, you can choose to change the chart type. Further, you can also change the existing layout of the chart by choosing from different layouts available for that particular type of chart. Here, we have tweaked the numbers a little to showcase trends of individual age groups.

For hypothetical data like this, when you don’t have space for big charts, you can choose to use the Sparkline feature instead. Select a blank cell, click Insert, and pick the Sparkline type.

Choose the data range for which you need a Sparkline and then click OK.

Once you are done, you can drag the handle for more.

Next, try editing your charts using the features we discussed in this video and share your comments. Your comments can also include various other alternatives to edit a chart in Excel too.