Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007 Inside Out

Formatting Areas

Excel 2007 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, right-click the object on your chart, and click the associated Format command. (If you don’t see the Format command, select the object in the Chart Objects list, and click Format Selection.) The area-formatting options for a selected chart item appear when you select Fill ...