How to NOT spend $ 150,000 and still dress up your charts

Share

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

By now everyone and their grandmother must have known about how Republican National Committee has spent $ 150,000 on Sarah Palin’s clothing and make up. I am a big fan of clothes. So much that I wear them everyday. But not all of us have a committee or fund raisers to dress up ourselves, none the less for our charts and reports.

That is where you can find Pointy Haired Dilbert useful. I am going to share with you all 5 simple yet effective ways to dress up your charts without spending a penny (or not more than few minutes of time).

1. Use Gradients, Pattern Fills instead of Colors

Select the data series you want to fill with gradient fill (or patterns) and right click, select “format data series”. In the dialog click on “Fill effects” and navigate to gradient tab (or patterns).

Note: go easy on gradients as they may not always gel well with other objects on your slide / report.

2. Use Images to Fill instead of Colors

If using gradients is playing with colors, you can use images to fill the bar (or pie or area) of the chart to decorate your charts. One of the good uses of this technique is to fill each series element with the image of what it represents. For eg. if you are showing sales of your products, fill each bar with small images of your product.

Just right click on the data series element, select format, and in the fill effects dialog, navigate to either “picture” tab. Don’t forget to click on “stacked” option. Otherwise excel would try to stretch your image to fit in the fill area and it looks ugly.

3. Add Text to Chart Area to Grab User Attention

This is one of my favorite technique. You can grab user attention using call outs placed on the chart.

Just select the chart and start typing anything. You will see a new text area added to your chart (the text area is bound to chart, so when you copy paste the chart even this text will be pasted). Now format the text area using drawing tool bar to a call out or star or something nice.

4. Use Bold and Creative Colors

Just go to Colorlovers or Smashing Magazine. Get some design inspiration on which colors to use. Now once you have the colors, just create 1×1 pixel images for each color in your favorite image editor. Then specify these images as fill images (learn more about overcoming 56 color limitation in excel). You now have excel charts that are bold and colorful.

5. Replace the Labels with Company Logos

Instead of using those boring labels to describe what each element on your chart means, you can use images to the story. See how you can yummify a simple “break-up of breakfast snacks in the last 30 days” chart.

Select the chart. Now go to Menu > Insert > Picture > From File and select your company logos or product images or something that conveys what the label does.  Adjust the images and re-size them. 🙂

Of course, you can always download these 73 beautiful excel chart templates for free and become a formatting rock star overnight.

More Excel Charting Ideas and Tips.

Subscribe to our RSS Feeds or Email News Letter and get these and many more Excel tips delivered to your desktop.

All these tips are tested on Excel 2003. Palin’s Image is from Wikipedia.

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Share this tip with your colleagues

Excel and Power BI tips - Chandoo.org Newsletter

Get FREE Excel + Power BI Tips

Simple, fun and useful emails, once per week.

Learn & be awesome.

Welcome to Chandoo.org

Thank you so much for visiting. My aim is to make you awesome in Excel & Power BI. I do this by sharing videos, tips, examples and downloads on this website. There are more than 1,000 pages with all things Excel, Power BI, Dashboards & VBA here. Go ahead and spend few minutes to be AWESOME.

Read my storyFREE Excel tips book

Overall I learned a lot and I thought you did a great job of explaining how to do things. This will definitely elevate my reporting in the future.
Rebekah S
Reporting Analyst
Excel formula list - 100+ examples and howto guide for you

From simple to complex, there is a formula for every occasion. Check out the list now.

Calendars, invoices, trackers and much more. All free, fun and fantastic.

Advanced Pivot Table tricks

Power Query, Data model, DAX, Filters, Slicers, Conditional formats and beautiful charts. It's all here.

Still on fence about Power BI? In this getting started guide, learn what is Power BI, how to get it and how to create your first report from scratch.

One Response to “How to compare two Excel sheets using VLOOKUP? [FREE Template]”

  1. Danny says:

    Maybe I missed it, but this method doesn't include data from James that isn't contained in Sara's data.

    I added a new sheet, and named the ranges for Sara and James.

    Maybe something like:
    B2: =SORT(UNIQUE(VSTACK(SaraCust, JamesCust)))
    C2: =XLOOKUP(B2#,SaraCust,SaraPaid,"Missing")
    D2: =XLOOKUP(B2#,JamesCust, JamesPaid,"Missing")
    E2: =IF(ISERROR(C2#+D2#),"Missing",IF(C2#=D2#,"Yes","No"))

    Then we can still do similar conditional formatting. But this will pull in data missing from Sara's sheet as well.

Leave a Reply