Instead of adding text boxes–which I find will never go exactly where I want them and can sometimes get lost as I copy and paste from Excel into another program like PowerPoint–add additional data to your chart and use data labels for those extra series. Let me offer two alternative ways to directly label your chart. In Method #2, she inserted text boxes in the graphic this approach would work in just about any version of Excel. Method #1 used the new labeling feature in Excel 2013. Stephanie’s showed two ways to directly label a line chart in Excel. Once you’ve had some success on that front, you can push forward to directly annotating your visualizations providing explanations, labels, and additional content.īut I digress. For most of us, the easiest way to do this is to integrate our text and graphics and directly label our visualizations. Stephanie’s post is consistent with a general strategy I use and refer to as “integrating text and graphics.” The idea is to create more effective visualizations by merging explanatory text and the visualization itself.
In it, she offered some guidance about how to get rid of your default legends and directly label your charts in Excel. My friend Stephanie Evergreen–who co-hosts the awesome Rad Presenters Podcast with me–published a post last week about labeling charts in Excel.
