Simple Charting Tricks

Feb 2

Here are some simple charting tricks that have become invaluable to me. It can often times be difficult to get PowerPoint and Excel to bend to your will. Sometimes you need a chart to look a certain way. Sometimes you simply need go beyond the limited flexibility of these applications to make you chart labels to not look amateurish. Below are some of the things I do on a regular basis. None of these are game changers, but they have all saved me time and aggravation since I started using them. So, let’s look at a few best practices in chart production.

Automatically Hide Zero Values in a Chart

Getting rid of those annoying zero value labels is easy. Deleting them manually can be problematic if you plan to copy and reuse the chart. All that needs to be done is to format each of the labels in the data series as a custom number.

Click on the data labels in the chart
Select Format Data Labels
Scroll down to Number
Under Category select Custom
Type 0%;-0%; for percentages or #,###””;#,###”” for numbers

Note: To show percentages and numbers explicitly as + / - use: +0%;-0%;0% and +””#,##0””;-””#,##0””;””#,##0””

Stop Pie Chart Labels from Wrapping

I don’t love pie charts. I tend to use them sparingly. If you’ve ever tried to shrink the size of a pie chart you will often see the data labels wrap.

Labels on pie charts can be formatted to not wrap, no matter how large the font size. This makes it possible to shrink these charts down to very small sizes without having things fall apart. To manage this, select the chart labels and open the Format Data Labels menu.

From here, go to Text Options and simply uncheck the 'Wrap text in shape' option. I like to also reduce all the margins around the labels to zero - which I like to do for any chart I make.

Unformatted Data Labels