Saturday 18 July 2015

How to Format Pie Chart segments in Microsoft Excel

How to Format Pie Chart segments in Microsoft Excel

From the previous lesson, your Pie Chart segements look like this:
Pie Chart Segements
You can change the colour of each slice of your pie chart, and even move a slice. Let's change the colours first.

 

Change the Colour of a Pie Chart Segement

Left click on the pie chart itself to select it:
The Selected Pie Chart
It is selected when you can see those round handles. Now left click on one of the segments to select just that individual slice. It's a little bit tricky, but if you do it right your pie chart should look like this:
An Individual segement is selected
In the image above, only the 10.99 segment is selected. You should see round circles surrounding just that segment. Now right click your segment and, from the menu that appears, select Format Data Point:
Select Format Data Point from the menu
You should see the following dialogue box appears (you'll see a panel appear on the right of your screen in Excel 2013. The same options will be available as the ones below, however):
The Format Data Point dialogue box
Click on Fill from the options on the left (Excel 2013 user should click the paint bucket icon at the top, then click to expand the Fill option). The dialogue box changes to this:
Fill a Data Point
There are quite a lot of options to experiment with. But select the Solid Fill option:
Solid Fill Data Point
Now click the colour picker, and choose a new colour for the segment:
Colour Options
We've gone for a dark orange colour, but select any colour you like.

 

Move a Pie Chart Segement in Excel

To move the slice that you've just coloured, click back on Series Options from the options on the left:
Click back on Series Options
In Excel 2013, click the three bars icon:
Series points in Excel 2013
Set the Point Explosion slider to about 30%
Point Explosion is set to 30 percent
Now click the Close button. Your chart should look something like this one:
The Finished Excel 2007 Pie Chart
Change the rest of the slices in exactly the same way. You can format the rest of the chart exactly like you did for the Bar chart. But it looks quite impressive as it is!

In the next part, we'll look at our third and final chart style - a 2D Line Chart.

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