Prettier Excel Charts

Posted at 04 Jul 2011

I am working with a summer intern on visualizing trends on the mobile Internet in China. We use the Microsoft Office stack extensively all the way through. I find that over all these years, the default setup for charts in Excel is still to improve. I summarized some tips below FYI so you can easily apply to make the (bar) charts prettier.

  • Choose your theme color to highlight and use greyscale colors for the rest of the charts
  • Remove the gridlines, ticks on the horizontal axis and the vertical axis - nothing but distractions
  • Use data value in the bars to indicate numeric values
  • Move the legend to the bottom
  • Remove the title and other stuff. Add them using textbox in PowerPoint

You should be able to get this in the end.

the chart