There have been many articles written about how terrible the default charts are in Excel. They are full of details that detract from the actual information that you are trying to convey. I recently discovered a few great tips for easily improving the quality of your charts. It doesn’t take much effort to set up, and it very easy to apply once you are done.
The easiest thing to do is to install the free Clean Charts Excel plugin by Juicy Analytics. This very nifty macro just finds all of the charts in your open worksheet and gives you the option of applying some more sane formatting to them. For example:
- The axis labels will all have the same number of significant digits (no more 1 1.5 2 2.5, instead 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5).
- Axis labels are changed so that they are most meaningful (100,000 becomes 100k so you have less digits that aren’t telling you anything).
- Line and bar colors are changed to be high contrast and distinct from each other.
- The gray background is eliminated. It only reduces contrast to the chart contents.
- Superfluous lines and boxes are eliminated. You are trying to present data, so all elements should contribute to that presentation. Continue reading ‘Make Excel charts less terrible’