Office 2007 Bible

Formatting a Chart

In the following sections, you learn about chart formatting. There is so much that you can do to a chart that this subject could easily take up its own chapter! For example, just like any other object, you can resize a chart. You can also change the fonts, change the colors and shading of bars, lines, or pie slices, use different background colors, change the 3-D angle, and much more.

Tip

The Format dialog box can remain open while you format various parts of the chart. Just click a different part of the chart behind the open dialog box (drag it off to the side if needed); the controls in the dialog box change to reflect the part that you have selected.

Clearing manually applied formatting

PowerPoint uses Format dialog boxes that are related to the various parts of the chart. These dialog boxes are nonmodal, which means that they can stay open indefinitely, that their changes are applied immediately, and that you don’t have to close the dialog box to continue working on the document. Although this is handy, it is all too easy to make an unintended formatting change.

To clear the formatting that is applied to a chart element, select it and then, on the Format tab, click Reset to Match Style. This strips off the manually applied formatting from that element, returning it to whatever appearance is specified by the chart style that you have applied.

Formatting titles and labels

Once you add a title or label to your chart, you can change its size, attributes, colors, ...