Microsoft® Excel® 2010 Inside Out

Formatting Areas

Excel 2010 provides a rich set of options for formatting the background areas of your charts—including the plot area, the chart area, and the walls and floors of three-dimensional charts. You can also apply these formatting options to legends, to the background areas of titles and data labels, and to certain kinds of chart markers—including columns, bars, pyramids, cones, cylinders, areas, bubbles, pie slices, and doughnut bites.

To format a chart element’s area, double-click the element. The area-formatting options for a selected chart item appear when you select Fill in the item’s formatting dialog box. Figure 21-3 shows the Fill options for the Format Plot Area dialog box. As for line formatting, the default option for area ...