73 Free Designer Quality Excel Chart Templates – Grab now and become a charting superman

Posted on March 28th, 2008 in All Time Hits , Charts and Graphs , Featured , Learn Excel - 65 comments

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Free Microsoft Excel Designer Quality Chart / graph templates- download now!

How many times you created a chart in Microsoft excel and formatted it for minutes (and sometimes hours) to reduce the eye-sore?

Well, I will tell you my answer, its 293049430493 times ;)

Worry not! for you can become a charting superman (or elastigirl) by using these 73 free designer quality chart templates in literally no time (well, almost)

These templates will take care of typical formatting activities like,

  • Remove that ugly Grey color background from the chart
  • Change the default grid line format from intrusive solid black to a duller shade of dotted Grey
  • Adjust the fonts (to verdana in this case), remove annoying chart auto-font-scaling
  • Move the legend to a meaningful location and adjust its size
  • And, ofcouse, fix the colors

so that you, the user can focus on your data and not on “why in the world anyone would design a default format like this…”, so go ahead and unleash the charting pro in you.

Download the free MS Excel chart / graph templates

Click here to download the templates

If you are wondering how to use these templates, scroll all the way down the post :)

More Charting Resources

Excel Dashboards – Tutorials & Downloads
Free Excel Downloads
Charts and Graphs

1. Bar / Column Chart Templates:

(29 of them)

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

MS EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

2. Stacked Bar / Column Chart Templates:

(22 of them)
Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

3. Pie Chart Templates:

(22 of them)
Even though I seldom use pie-charts (since they hide more than they show and all that) I know a lot of people do use them and hence here they are,
Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templatesMicrosoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templatesMicrosoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templatesMicrosoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templatesMicrosoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templatesMicrosoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templatesMicrosoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templatesMicrosoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templatesMicrosoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templatesMicrosoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templatesMicrosoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

Microsoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templatesMicrosoft EXCEL 2003 (2000) free designer quality chart templates

How to use these templates?

Learn more about using chart templates in excel

  • Method 1 – Easy and Quick:

    • Download the chart templates (download links at top and bottom of this post)
    • Copy both the chart you wanted and the “data used” portion
    • Paste in your workbook
    • Change the values, remove columns (or add them if you wish)
    • Modify formatting if needed
    • Be careful now, as your boss may feel zealous for your charting skills
  • Method 2: Slightly geeky but works like a charm!
    • Download the chart templates (download links at top and bottom of this post)
    • Select the chart you want, right click and select “Chart type” from the context menu
      [note: for more detailed steps & how-to, look in the excel worksheets you have downloaded
    • In the dailog, go to “custom types” tab and select “User-defined” radio button (towards bottom left)
    • Click on “Add…” button, and give your chart-template a name that you can remember
    • When you are done, click ok, and the chart is now added to your user-defined-charts library
    • In future, when you want to use the chart, simply click on charts icon on tool bar, and select the chart type as custom -> user defined ->your chart name
    • Now, watch out as your charts start stealing eyeballs in the boardroom!

Finally we can say good bye to default chart formats and all the associated eyesore
excel default chart format yuck!

Download the free MS Excel chart / graph templates

(I have put them in 3 separate excel sheets):

Click here to download

More Charting Resources

Excel Dashboards – Tutorials & Downloads
Free Excel Downloads
Charts and Graphs

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Comments
Monte Bel March 29, 2008

There’s nothing worse than the default MS chart formats. Thank you for working to rid the world of these eyesores.

Man, you sure do have a fetish for Excel.

Cristobal April 1, 2008

What about line charts? These are great but not feeling the love for the lines. -C

@Monte Bel – thank you for visiting PHD and commenting :) Hope you liked the templates

@ Kapil : thanks :)

@Cristobal: Thanks for visiting PHD, btw, the line charts are there, just load the template and convert the chart type from bar chart to line chart, the colors would adjust automatically (they should :P ), let me know if this doesn’t work.

Really cool templates, many thanks, I downloaded them for future use. Bye

Vaibhav April 14, 2008

Excellent prepared

Hi, your chart templates are great. I did n’t understand how to create 1*1 pixel in paint brush with the colour of my choice.

@DRN … thanks, you can create the color of your choice in mspaint by,

1. go to start > all programs > accessories > paint and click on it
2. double click on any of the color buttons at the bottom
3. select “Define custom colors >>”
4. enter RGB values for your color choice
5. click on “Add to custom colors”
6. click OK
7. select paint bucket tool (tool tip says “fill with color”)
8. click on the image area
9. go to menu > image > image attributes (or press ctrl+E)
10. enter 1 as width and height
11. save as bmp or jpg or gif

cool, now you have a 1*1 pixel in color of your choice.

Let me know if this helps you… :) welcome to PHD…

Thanks a lot…I got it :-)

Dhondu May 22, 2008

Chandoo, You are a Freaking Genius, you saved me atleast 2 days of work.
Thanks Man for this, great to see some value been added to the Internet.

Please do post some more sample, this will be really helpful to alot of us.

@Dhondu … welcome to PHD, thanks alot for your comments.. :)

Alpha Beta May 28, 2008

thank you!!!

Balamurugan June 5, 2008

you made my day..too much helpful

Sadiq Ali June 21, 2008

Dear Chandoo,

Really you are great yar! I learned most of the Conditional Formatting by your tips. If you have any other tips and tricks in excell please send me a link.

Thank You

With regards.

Sadiq Ali June 21, 2008

Is it possible to display charts simply by selecting the data, and is it possible to change the chart by selecting another data.

Please reply.

Nikhil June 22, 2008

Dear Excel Master,

Hi Chandoo I have changed your name …You are really great..I have download all cool templates for future use.

If you have any other tips and tricks in excel please send me a link.

Have nice Weekend Bue.

shanker July 25, 2008

Thank you so much sir, Really cool templates, I downloaded them for mu day to day use. KEEP IT UP!

@Sadiq Ali: Hi sorry, I didnt notice your question till now “Is it possible to display charts simply by selecting the data, and is it possible to change the chart by selecting another data.”

well, its not possible to plot charts dynamically by selecting data unless you are willing to write some VBA. There are other techniques to make charts look dynamic, I will write about one such technique sometime soon.. keep watching this blog :)

@Nikhil – welcome to PHD blog, thanks for your comments. Sure, just subscribe to our mailing list or blog content feed to get fresh hot excel tips everyday.

@Shanker – Welcome to PHD blog. Thanks for your comments. Keep visiting this place to enjoy more tips :)

Hi Chandoo!
I’ve been reading through a lot of the site for hours and I got a question man, I’ve encountered recently some excel documents a co-worker downloaded which is sort of a quiz, basically a game quiz, it has an image of a movie and you had to guess the name in a box then, a box below gave you a correct with green bgcolor or wrong in red bgcolor. My question is what kind of formula or way, can I get to use this so I can do some quiz test for some students? it’s a very ingenius way to pop the brain a bit with excel. I appreciate the time you put into this site, keep up the work.

hi chandoo,

is my second time typing it seems my explorer sucks, I’ll make it short this time, I received an email with an excel document that does a quiz where they showed you an image of a movie and you had to answer which movie is it from, almost case sensitive capitals don’t matter, so i would like to know what is the formula or whatever it is so i can apply it on educative ways for classes. thanks for the time you put into this site.

@istreva … thankfully your first comment made to my server before crashing your browser. Welcome to PHD and thanks for the comments :)

You can create a quiz in excel by using protected cells and conditional formatting. I will write a tutorial on this may be in the next 2 weeks. Basically the way to do this is to have the answers in a range that is protected so that no one can view it, and then use conditional formatting on cell(s) to change color to red / green based the answer entered by quiz taker.

I think that would be awsome, I’ve been trying to figure that out but I’m not an excel guru, I studied some computer programing and done some javascript, so i thought there would be some “if” “then” involved, I think If you can point me in one direction with one sample I can manage to replicate the process and maybe even add on some more to it! Thanks man, 6 hours a day in the office can be very insighfull reading your site :-)

Hi

I just found this site and am happy to find other people interested in Excel as much as I am!. I have a problem because my IE can’t find the link to download the charts. Are they still available??

Thanks

Joseph

@Joseph: Welcome to PHD and thanks for visiting us :)

You can download the files from http://cid-b663e096d6c08c74.skydrive.live.com/embedrow.aspx/Public/73%20Free%20Designer%20Quality%20Excel%20Chart%20Templates.zip it is a one zip file available for download from Live.com’s skydrive. Let me know if you have access issues, I can upload the file to my own server and give you another link.

Thanks,

Hi Chandoo, this site is really useful for my report. Everyone might admire me as of my interesting presentation. nice day!

Thaopham: Awesome… I am happy you found this useful :)

I am still not able to download these templets…….ti shows access denied…..sorry for being too demanding but if you could mail to my id azmat1979@rediffmail.com it would be highly appreceiated

hi Chandoo… this is of great help and saves a lot of time…
Thanks

Fantastic! I don’t use Excel much, but this is so cool, I had to download the templates :)

Thank you.

Deepak March 2, 2009

Great work!!! This is very useful!! Cheers – Deepak

perfect! thanks very much for your contribution.

Ben Laden March 18, 2009

Excellent charts!

Microsoft must buy your chart templates and use them in their next Office release.

May God bless you.

rajinikanth April 7, 2009

Hi Chandoo,

Thank you very much…I learned a lot conditional formatting &
Dashboard technique because of you.
If you can provide more dashborad examples clearly..then it will be
a great help.

Regards
Rajinikanth

thanks for your valuable chart templates. really they are very useful. keep up good job.

rajinikanth April 25, 2009

Hi Chandoo,

Its very good help for every one who wants to prepare the charts,
your templates are good and I utilised some of the templates with some modifications.
Great job!!!!!!thanks

@Rajinikanth: Welcome to PHD and thanks for your nice words. I am very happy you liked the templates and using them in your work.

@Nick: Welcome to PHD and I am happy you liked these charts.

tanveer hussain May 23, 2009

good day, dear, This is very useful, thanks a lot,
keep is going,

Shannon Lin August 26, 2009

I want to create a chart where the bars in the chart mirror the color in the cells used to create it. For example, if something is Red at 12% and Green at 85%, I want the columns in the chart to be Red at 12% and Green at 85%. Whenever I try to create the chart it colors each bar the same. Is what I want to do possible?

jeff weir August 26, 2009

SHannon – one way you could do this is to add a different series to the chart for each colour that you will be using, then format those series the specific colours you want. The series would need to reference different columns, which would only contain the data specific to each colour.

For instance, if your original data was in a column starting from A2, then in the cell B2 (which will be where the green series of the graph points to) you would have a formula like =if(A2 > .80, A1, na()) which means that only data that meets your cut-off point for being green (80% in this example) gets copied there. Anything else gets entered as the error #N/A, which Excel doesn’t plot.

THis should do the trick.

Thanks for your work. It’s what I ever wanted in Excel, otherwise a good program.
Little question – the edges of the pie charts are uneven – is some anti-aliasing possible?

Dear Sir
Actually an looking for your help.
I have a folder which contain word and excel working on .However it me personal file but have to dispute in where a lots of person to get access with it .is it possible to put it with an easy way as read only just they can view it only.Thanking in advance for your help

@Martin… Try using Excel 2007, it makes the edges of charts look more smoother. More on the charting differences between 2007 and 2003 here: http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/why-i-dont-like-excel-2007-charts/

@Krishun… You can use the protect sheet options to protect ranges or whole worksheets from editing. Learn more here: http://chandoo.org/wp/2009/11/03/make-better-excel-sheets/

Excellent!! I’ve been looking for some nice looking charts!

Dr. Tina Medina December 13, 2009

You are an angel!!!! I have struggled with a pie chart, but not anymore!!

Thanks,

Wise Writers and Speakers

Catherine January 19, 2010

Hi Chandoo
When I try to download it does nt come as a normal zip folder and it asks which program to use? I tried excel and doesn’t work! any ideas :-(

@Catherine… sometimes live.com adds an underscore “_” at the beginning and end of the file name. just select the file, press “F2″ and remove the “_” from end. This should make the file work with winzip (or expand all option).

its great..
thank you

Thats Gr8:-)

Hi Chandoo,

I found these templates, and like the idea of using them. However, I must be missing something because when I follow the directions, the result I get is not what I expected. When I choose the range $N$9:$S$13 and select the user defined chart, I get a really strange result.

I found that I had to select only the data values ($O$10:$S$13), then when the used designed chart appears, manually re-enter the X Axis series ($N$10:$N$13), and the each references for each of the years ($O$9 etc.).

Any idea what I am doing wrong?

Regards David

Thank you! This looks great. The defaults look horrible. You’ve done a great job with these templates!

Junaid May 18, 2010

Great Work;

It is very useful in a real life and time saving as well.

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